Have to consider meat digestion from a net calorie perspective. Eating raw meat is possible sure. But once you get to dense protein meats like a red meat, your body expends a lot of calories in the act of digesting it raw. Cooking it is like a pre-digestion step and allows your body to digest it with less energy expenditure.

It also probably was helpful for other reasons. You could store cooked meat easier/longer without refrigeration or kill off some of the bacteria and such making it healthier.

Much like today, early humans were indeed capable of eating meat raw.

Also much like today, early humans did not do so if there was a way to cook it.

If you're quite finished parroting RFK Jr pro-parasitic brain worm talking points not even aboriginal Australians ate their fish and meat raw.

* https://warndu.com/blogs/blog/traditional-aboriginal-food

Actually yeah Australian aborigines have a famously rigorous oral history.

Midden piles.

Which part of my first comment isn’t factually correct?

The implication that because humans are "capable of eating animals raw" they therefore must do a lot of that (isolated idiots aside).

The Inca had a method of drying potatoes such that they were stable for multiple years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chu%C3%B1o

But the Inca lived to late for this discussion. They already had advanced agriculture. For evolutionary terms, the time before agriculture and the time of the predecessors of homo sapiens are more relevant, because that time span was larger by orders of magnitude.

Fruit doesn't go bad in a day.

Maybe they took dried fruit

Ok.