Our ancestor's inability to chew huge chunks of meat and vegetables paved the way to becoming modern humans. The invention of stone cutting tools seems inevitable as the early humans created ways to chop up their food for easier chewing.

The consumption of a wider array of foods gave our ancestors the needed nutrients to literally develop what our anatomy is today. Our bigger brains enabled us to run, talk, think and basically be above all other animals.

'Food Processing' in Addition to Cooking Food Helped Our Ancestors Gain More Nutrients

A new study published in Nature stated that meat was introduced to the human diet more than two million years ago. However, our ancestors didn't cook food until 500,000 years ago. So how did meat get into our diet? Our ancestors ate their meat raw and thought to ease the daunting task of eating raw meat by chopping up their food with stone tools, NPR notes.

Study author Daniel Lieberman, evolutionary biologist at Harvard University, explained that the Homo Erectus evolved to have bigger brains and modern humans had less need to have more powerful jaws and teeth because of less chewing.

"Chewing is one of the key characteristics of being a mammal," Lieberman said in a press release, per EurekAlert. "Most other animals, like reptiles, barely chew their food - they just swallow it whole. The evolution of the ability to chew food into smaller particles gave mammals a big boost of extra energy because smaller particles have a higher surface area to volume ratio, allowing digestive enzymes to then break food down more efficiently."

Less Time Chewing Changed Our Ancestors' Way of Living

The less of a need for chewing didn't only change our physical anatomy. It is true that if not for stone cutting tools, we still would have snouts, bigger teeth and powerful chewing jaws. However, Lieberman adds that thanks to higher quality in the early humans' diet, we have bigger brains that allowed us to talk, think and generally evolve into what we are today.

The simple technology of slicing meat and vegetables paved the way for hunting and gathering, which explains our evolution.

"Following the invention of hunting and gathering, though, humans can benefit from a division of labor," Lieberman explained. "Someone else may have come back with an impala, or some tubers you could eat. And instead of spending all night eating it, you'd spend a lot less time, energy and effort to chew it by pounding it or cutting it with just a few stone stone tools. What a dramatic shift!"

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