Reddit reviews Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human

This is actually more of an anthropological/archaeological question than a historical one, as cooking pre-dates written records according to archaeological evidence. You might want to try /r/anthropology for more indepth answers.

However to give you a reference, Catching Fire written by a professor of anthropology at Harvard delves into the subject.

He elaborates on the idea (keeping in mind this idea is not without its dissenters) that humans evolved specifically to eat cooked food because it reduced the amount of digestive body mass needed to sustain ourselves, thus re-allocating body mass toward brain power.

Namely that cooked food universally results in greater food energy absorption, and is almost universally preferred by any animal that gets a hold of it, but is over time unhealthy because the act of cooking is carcinogenic.

Basically, the specific human adaptation is to have digestive systems that "reduce" (but not eliminate) the carcinogenic dangers of cooked food as a tradeoff for increased brain mass.

If you are interested, the book Catching Fire is a fascinating look into how humans may have evolved after learning to cook food with fire.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0097D71MQ/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

The problem isn't just parasites, it's that you don't get as much net calories from raw foods, because they take more energy to digest.

When people ate raw meat, they survived because they didn't need as many calories, because their brains were smaller. Learning to control fire and cook is what allowed hominids to evolve into modern big-brained humans.

Sources: article, book

(Not everybody agrees with this hypothesis, but more do now that there's evidence of fire being used a million years ago.)

Here's another interesting article about other effects of fire on human evolution.

Cooking / use of fire is one characteristic that all human societies have, and no nonhuman animals have. Relying on heat to pre-digest our food (break it down) allowed us to grow big brains and become human. This book describes how in great detail, and even finds evidence in the fossil record for when our ancestors started regularly using and controlling fire.

Tl;dr: Horses are evolved to eat grass, cats are evolved to eat raw meat, humans are evolved to eat cooked food.

Also: apparently all animals prefer cooked food when offered.

This book covers it nicely. Our digestive system is not an exact match of our fellow great apes. We have extremely small stomachs which lack the capacity to thrive entirely on uncooked food. It is possible to survive on uncooked food but the our system is so inefficient at it that at maximum stomach capacity all day you are barely getting enough calories to stay alive. Without modern genetically engineered energy-dense raw foods as well you would lose ancillary functions on a raw food diet such as sexual function. Our saliva and enzyme system, chewing, cooking, small stomach, unique intestinal flora make us a very different kind of ape.