The use of fire was developed about 1.8 million years ago, and we didn’t do it. This was early in the existence of Homo erectus, our immediate predecessor species. What followed was probably less a case of discovering that this or that food needed to be cooked and more one of the new technique, cooking, being applied to many potential foods. Cooking softens foods, letting individuals with weaker jaws to consume them. This had a massive impact on our evolution, since being able to get by with weaker jaws while being able to eat more different species of foods let our erectus ancestors develop bigger skulls and bigger brains. Cooking let us get smarter, which meant that we were better at hunting and had more diverse foods we could get by gathering, which meant that we got more food, could grow even larger brains (which are metabolically “expensive”), get better at getting more food…and so on until, about 300,000 years ago, our species developed.
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