Why did evolution allow humans to become so intelligent?

elaborate?

Well, your overly simplistic view of intellect.
I mean, first of all, having a brain our size requires a huge energy consumption.

>The only reason X trait exists
persists

>Homo erectus discovered fire
>A genetic mutation made our jaw muscles smaller

Alright, persists!

>I mean, first of all, having a brain our size requires a huge energy consumption.
Yes but the advantage of having bigger brain is too much. A lot of other developments also have associated costs. Isnt it a bit curious that flight was developed at least three times completely separately but human level intelligence only once. Especially considering how long since we have had basic brain.

>Why did evolution allow humans to become so intelligent?
Because politics.

Politics is something that features heavily in recent human evolutionary history, and is even clearly visible among the other great apes. Twenty thousand years ago on the savanna, the guy who could most effectively argue that he deserved a larger part of the meat than everyone else, lived longer. The guy who politicked himself onto the top and got the be the king, had lots of kids. The guy who managed to convince the tribe to execute that fucker Horg... sure did better than Horg, evolutionarily.

In an environment that features politics, it is advantageous to be smarter than *everyone else*. It's not enough to be smart enough to survive through the winter, or hunt a deer successfully, or in some other way outsmart the environment; you are in a strong evolutionary position if you can outsmart *other people around you*.

If there is an evolutionary advantage to outsmarting people around you, there is a very strong evolutionary pressure towards more intelligence, without limit -- more is better, because everyone else around you is also getting more intelligent, requiring you to be more intelligent yet to beat them. And so we see strong evolution towards more intelligence, at the cost of most other considerations, with every generation.

>The method of birthing too many young and allowing the weak also works, almost better than the human method.
Both methods have their advantages and drawbacks. The human method works better in less dynamic conditions where competition is fierce, while the quantity over quality method works in cataclysmic times where a disaster has killed off a lot of competition or something has changed the established niches.

I already said it man. Fire. No other species had fire. Fire allowed us to digest and capture food more easily, accounting for the energy requirements. Also, a mutation made it so that our jaw muscles didn't take up so much skull space so we could grow bigger brains.

Well then why are (early) humans the only animal to experiment with fire? Why did no one else even try to control it? 3.5 billion years of evolution and only one animal thinks of using fire?