One possible explanation for this is the expensive tissue hypothesis. It holds that the evolving human body traded disinvestment in digestive tissue for investment in brain tissue. In support of this hypothesis, primatologist Richard Wrangham and his collaborators proposed that our unique ability to cook using fire—essentially outsourcing some of the work of digestion to the cooking process—allowed the human brain to reach its current size. Wrangham’s “we are because we cook” theory proposes that cooking unlocked access to stores of carbohydrates needed to support what were the largest
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