[dennis_jeeves2]

>Our extremely energy-intensive brains can only be fed because we pre-digest our meals through fire.

The exception being animal derived foods. ( eggs, meat, fish, milk etc.). These food can be raw, and will still reliably fuel the brain.

[adrian_b]

This is correct.

Heat treatment of animal food has benefits, like killing parasites, softening meat enough for weak human teeth, extracting proteins from bones through boiling, or denaturating harmful proteins, like those from egg whites, but it has little importance for digestibility.

In general, heat treatment is not useful for fatty substances and it is seldom useful for proteins. Heat treatment is important mainly for making starch digestible and for releasing various components of vegetable cells that would otherwise require much more chewing or much more fermentation time in the guts than possible for humans.

[Daishiman]

And yet we've been using fire to cook food for much longer than most of the recognizable homo sapiens features emerged, so no, we weren't eating raw food.