Cooking food helped humans evolve

National Geographic - Cooking Gave Humans Edge Over Apes?

A poorly explored and written article discusses the basic premise that cooking food is a near-universal practice in humans and allowed for evolutionary changes that gave humans the ability to spread across the globe. Cooking breaks down hard starches and dense tubers, making eating much easier to do-- and allowing much smaller jaws and teeth in humans versus their nearest primate ancestors. The foremost advocate of this position is Richard Wrangham, who has been exploring this thesis for years. One interesting fact in the latter part of the article talked about equipping the few remaining hunter-gather societies with pedometers and discovering they walk an average of 8 miles a day; of course their diet and lifestyle keeps them relatively free of developed-world diseases like diabetes, heart disease, etc.