Even if that were true (and not another Darwinist fantasy), it tells me nothing about how humans evolved to be infinitely more intelligent than chimps.
Humans are not 'infinitely more intelligent' than chimps. In some aspects of intelligence, chimps perform better than humans. But we developed deliberative reasoning, more sophisticated metacognition, and language, which give us a huge advantage in specific areas. In typical human fashion, we select the specific areas in which we excel and define these as the measure of superiority over other creatures. This is called hubris.
But as you can see from the ongoing wars and tribalism around the world - and the point-scoring and tribalism in these forums - our superior reasoning is a rather thin veneer over our baser animal instincts. Empirical evidence suggests that our wonderful powers of reason are mainly used to justify our feelings and the actions that follow from them - as Hume said in 1740, "reason is a slave to the passions."
So a mutation happened along that made an ape start using fire to cook food?
That was a behavioural change, so not a result of any specific mutations, but an indirect result of the mutations that produced an increase in intelligence in using and manipulating objects, e.g. tools. It's not hard to imagine how it might have happened - natural fires will cook vegetables and animals that can't escape, and a hungry hunter-gatherer would be surprised at how tasty and easy to eat such food was. Before learning/discovering how to make fire, burning or glowing sticks or embers from natural fire would have been carried as precious sources for new fires - this is still done in some hunter-gatherer cultures.
The knowledge of how to use fire to cook would be passed down the generations; this is called culture. We have observed how some monkeys, dolphins, and even birds, have discovered how to make useful tools from natural objects and their offspring and others have learned from them how to do the same. So animals can have culture too.
Nice story, but what a pity there's not a scrap of empirical evidence that suggests more calories will cause the evolution of a larger and smarter brain.
You misunderstood me, I said, "...more calories
to support larger brains." IOW, more calories don't
cause bigger brains, they enable or allow for bigger brains. A human brain requires a lot of energy - it uses about 20% of the energy the body produces. Energy usage is finely balanced, and without surplus calories, an increase in brain size (perhaps a mutation that causes it to grow for longer, or to make more nerve cells) is likely to be a disadvantage, it will not have sufficient energy to function effectively and/or it will reduce the energy available to the rest of the body. But when surplus calories are available, mutations that increase brain size become advantageous.
... which tells me nothing about me nothing about how humans evolved to be infinitely more intelligent than chimps.
They didn't. See the start of this post.
