Richard Wrangham, a biological anthropologist at Harvard, argues that the human jaw started shrinking once we learned how to control fire. Since cooking softens meat and kills potentially harmful bacteria, we no longer needed the pronounced mouths and powerful forward-jutting jaws of our more apelike ancestors. Cooking also made vegetables and meat more nutritious. Instead of spending most of our time chewing plant fibers to break down resilient cellulose we could outsource that effort to fire, which radically increased our ability to extract calories. Wrangham writes in his book Catching Fire
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