Meat Fueled Human Brain Growth

Scientists think meat-eating, and later cooking, helped drive human brain growth by giving early humans more calories in less time than a raw plant diet could provide. Research discussed in 2012 reports that early humans gained an energy advantage from meat and cooked food, which reduced chewing and digestion costs and freed up more energy for larger brains. The same energy limit helps explain why gorillas, which already spend much of the day feeding on raw vegetation, could not simply evolve a human-sized brain without a major dietary shift.

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