system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
How did humans eat meat before fire?
gpt
Since everyone else touched on the technology of 'fire' existing pre-human, I'll chime in with another point:

We still eat raw meats today. Fish can be eaten raw, and often is in sushi. Inuit cultures eat meat raw often. And fresh game can be eaten raw as well. Beef tartare and 'tiger meat' are both raw and eaten today.

And you can order your steaks 'blue'. This isn't hot enough to get the internal temperature high enough to kill parasites or eggs, it's just enough to cook the surface. And that's largely the point, kill whatever was on the surface since that's the most likely place for it to pick something up. It's harder for bacteria to make their way INTO butchered meat if they weren't already there to begin with, and that's why when you grind it into hamburger you need to cook it more thoroughly, because you've just introduced anything on the surface to the insides too.

It isn't so much that raw meat can't be eaten, it's just that cooked meat is much easier on our intestines. They have to do less work since lots of the enzymes and proteins are broken down in the the cooking process. Our guts even got smaller as the developed a regular habit of eating cooked foods. It's more nutritionally available, so it doesn't take as much time to get all the valuable stuff from it.

So we can eat meat raw, and our ancestors did so too. But once people got the hang of fire to make every meal cooked, there's a clear winner in everyone's mind.

And it's not the bacteria and parasites.