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If you cooked dinner today — even a Cup O Noodles — you did something extraordinary and uniquely human. While the rest of the animal kingdom subsists on raw food, we Homo sapiens cook our chow.

And according to some researchers, this distinction made all the difference: When our ancestors mastered cooking roughly 2 million years ago it changed the course of human evolution, they say. Because cooked food provides more energy, the habit led to substantial