At our evolutionary roots we are a tech bubble, but that tech, cooking, was discovered by a species that we would put in a zoo if it was still around.
Not true. Chimps, our closest relative, eat meat which means our common ancestor also ate meat. So not only have humans been eating meat before cooking, our ancestors going back millions of years also ate meat. Also, human populations, like the inuit, eat meat without cooking. It's quite a task to start a fire in the frozen arctic. Anthony Bourdain had a show on the inuits a a while ago. And that's not including human populations throughout the world that eat insects/etc.
Cooking is what allowed humans to eat more meat and more efficiently, but it's absurd to claim humans only started eating meat after learning to cook.
Granted there is some can vs should such as lacking other adaptations to protect from hazards within. Turkey vulture stomachs for instance have acid stronger than car battery acid to digest carcasses safely.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/red-meat-processe...
It's true that we're weird because we cook it, but the weirdness isn't that it fundamentally changed our diet[1], but because it changed our gut. Our intestines shrunk a lot when we became cooking scavengers, to the point where we actually can't productively eat the diets that our ape ancestors did anymore, including their raw meat consumption.
[1] Though it did change our diet: we went from mostly-plant gatherers to mostly-meat scavengers, which required (or maybe the causality went the other way) that we leave the forest for grasslands where dead animals were larger and easier to find.
Are you sure on that? 50% of great apes eat meat. Of the lesser apes, gibbons will eat a tiny proportion.
> Non-human apes usually eat a small amount of raw animal foods such as insects or eggs
Arguable insects are meat, but if you invited someone round to eat some meat, I don't think they would expect insects so think that can be ruled out.
So some, but certainly not "almost all". And the ones that do, it is a tiny % of their diet, relative to most humans
Cooking food helps to avoid other problems, but we are a species perfectly able to digest a chunk of raw animal muscle with just a little burp. This kind of specialized cells will not appear in a weekend just by starting to cook food.
Cows can easily live and thrive on fishmeal but that does not mean the adaptations happened so cows can eat fishmeal.
Does this mean "hydrochloric"?
Wikipedia on "Control of fire by early humans":
Claims for the earliest definitive evidence of control of fire by a member of Homo range from 1.7 to 0.2 million years ago (Mya). Evidence for the 'microscopic traces of wood ash' as controlled use of fire by Homo erectus, beginning some 1,000,000 years ago, has wide scholarly support. Flint blades burned in fires roughly 300,000 years ago were found near fossils of early but not entirely modern Homo sapiens in Morocco. Fire was used regularly and systematically by early modern humans to heat treat silcrete stone to increase its flake-ability for the purpose of toolmaking approximately 164,000 years ago at the South African site of Pinnacle Point. Evidence of widespread control of fire by anatomically modern humans dates to approximately 125,000 years ago.
Wikipedia on "Mammals":
Mammals diverged from reptiles and birds in the late Triassic, 201kk-227kk years ago.
Wikipedia on "Dinosaur":
They first appeared during the Triassic period, between 243 and 233.23 million years ago, although the exact origin and timing of the evolution of dinosaurs is the subject of active research
A lot of cooking is just to avoid issues with bacteria and parasites.
Similarly, you can eat raw fish (if you don't worry about parasites), but you pretty much want to eat them right out of the water. As soon as you cut it and leave it alone for a while, it can start to go off. This is, in fact, the origin of sushi. Originally, people in the interior of the country couldn't eat fish because you couldn't transport it without going off. Instead, they would pickle it. This pickling eventually made its way to the rice. Most Edo period sushi used pickled fish.
I find all the science about it contrary to the actual personal experience.
As for the point that cooking helps digestion in another comment, again it makes absolutely no sense to me. After eating 200g of sliced raw beef my stomach feels amazing, way better for digestion.
The more I cook meat, the more bloated I feel etc
(I've also ate raw chicken every now and then for 15 years with no problems)
You also clearly have a microbiome accustomed to it for one and presumably the sources were sufficiently clean that doctors haven't found parasites or similar that cooking would address. I guess low quality means cut as opposed to "roadkill wildlife".
Raw fish used in sushi/sashimi is often butchered properly to prevent the fish's muscles from producing lactic acid (see ikijime), and then aged for flavour: https://medium.com/torodex/the-sushi-you-eat-isnt-fresh-f347...
Originally sushi started as picked fish. Then they got the idea to make blocks of pickled fish and picked rice (you can still buy this kind of sushi today in Japan). It really has only been in the last 150 years or so that sushi included raw, unprocessed fish, and only quite recently that it would have been available far away from the sea side.
Edit: I should qualify this as being in Honshu. I believe the Ainu people were eating raw fish for a long time - in the winter months, of course.
The risk are way overstated, no you are unlikely to get sick from eating super market ground beef raw.