What we now call barbecue had a part in how we developed as a species.
It's true, cooking our food over fires made it possible for us to take in nutrition more easily. It probably helped our brains grow.
It turns out a lot of things made our brains grow into the organ now capable of great feats of thinking. Bret Stetka, non-practicing physician and science journalist, gives us the long view, in A History of the Human Brain: From the Sea Sponge to CRISPR, How Our Brain Evolved.
Listen to wrap your brain around... uh, brains.