I can't think of a title so this will have to do.

  Though we are meat eaters, we didn't necessarily start out that way. It looks like we started with leaves, fruit and nuts then switched, probably through necessity and partly because when we left the forest, we started hunting the delicious animals on the savannah.

  Meat has a lot more calories so we didn't have to eat as much as we used to. As a result our guts shrank and our brain started to grow. We started walking upright and then running, a useful trait for a species that wanted to hunt.

  Another interesting nugget is that the change in diet meant our mouths shrank and our teeth got smaller but not very well. This is the reason the contents of our mouths go funny and we need all sorts of correction for our teeth like getting wisdom teeth pulled. There just isn't enough room for our enamel anymore. Anyway...

Lunch, if you're fast enough.

  Finally we started to cook. This would have been about 1.8 million years ago and the best answer for why happened is that some food probably got dropped in a fire and the idea caught on. To be honest, I've not found a lot of information about why cooking started, so this really is conjecture.

  The earliest cooking technique therefore would be grilling. It's a bit of a guess but it's a fairly safe deduction. What's harder is finding evidence of more sophisticated techniques like using a spit because as I'd said before, the problem with finding ancient evidence of any of this is that early kitchens tended to get incinerated.

  The shame is that most domestic kitchens don't allow us to recreate grilling over a fire. This doesn't stop us from trying, as can be seen as soon as the weather allows, when modern man instinctively returns to his prehistoric roots and lights up his barbecue. It's lucky he doesn't try to hunt too.

Kirk out

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