“It was much colder then, and during the time that we didn’t have fire they would have had to eat a lot of raw meat,” Kissel says. “This almost certainly meant that they had some pretty impressive gut bacteria.” If not for resilient guts humans would never have been able to survive on uncooked meat without risking serious illness. Indeed, the fossil record tells us that some of the most obvious skeletal changes occurred in conjunction with cooked food. Richard Wrangham, a biological anthropologist at Harvard, argues that the human jaw started shrinking once we learned how to control fire.
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