From what I understand about brain development from my child's pediatrician, dietary fat is important. I don't think the calorie argument is airtight. There's more to the story than is presented here.
Anyway, the author opens with information from one source who seemed to focus on meat and later includes information from another source focusing on cooking. An editor probably read two paragraphs and wrote the headline. Nothing to get bent about.
He actually spoke to 2 separate anthropologists who had different views about our evolutionary diet and he chose to weave them into his own narrative. The second anthropologist, Richard Wrangham wrote the book "Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human" and as you can see below he strongly contradicts the notion that we ate much raw meat
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/27/books/27garn.html?_r=1&...
Instead of writing about the differing opinions the author choses to strongly favor one view hide the fact that other is even in disagreement.
> Nothing to get bent about.
I think that deliberate twisting the of truth is something to legitimately get 'bent' about. The sad thing is the more than 50% of the people who see this will come away thinking they are basically saying 'meat makes you smarter' when neither of the views presented suggest anything of the sort.
...focusing on the facts mentioned and rather than the asides offered by the author.
Here's another reference to the part about starches
When I see the statement, "it was the additional supply of calories that made the difference - not some magical ingredient of meat", I want to see research.
And the phrase "diet Taliban" doesn't belong in this discussion.