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The title "Cooking made us human" by Richard Wrangham sounds intriquing considering the fact that half of the working population these days don't even know how a kitchen looks like let alone cook. An interesting explanation on how we the human evolves physically all thanks to cooked food.

Excerpts:

Cooking makes eating faster and easier, and wrings more caloric benefit from food. Moreover, cooking is vitally important to supporting the outsize human brain, which consumes a quarter of the body’s energy.
By freeing humans from having to spend half the day chewing tough raw food — as most of our primate relatives do — cooking allowed early humans to devote themselves to more productive activities, ultimately allowing the development of tools, agriculture, and social networks. Cooked food is also softer, meaning the body uses less energy digesting what it takes in.
Since physical remnants of fire tend to degrade rapidly, archaeological evidence of fire and cooking dates back only about 800,000 years. Biological evidence, shows that around 1.8 million years ago, Homo erectus arose with larger brains and bodies and smaller guts, jaws, and teeth — changes consistent with the switch to a more tender and energetically rich diet of cooked food.
Cooking is what makes the human diet ‘human,’ and the most logical explanation for the advances in brain and body size over our ape ancestors, It’s hard to imagine the leap to Homo erectus without cooking’s nutritional benefits.”