I do not know about this hypothesis, but it is well-established that the human brain takes enormous amounts of energy, and this has had a major impact on human evolution. Having a large brain is a tremendous burden. That is probably why there are few other highly intelligent species. During the evolution of the brain, humans discovered various ways to acquire much more nutrition than they had previously. If they had not, the burden of the energy drain would probably have cut off this line of development.
The increased nutrition is generally thought to have come from two developments, both the consequence of increased intelligence. First, people began making cutting tools not much different from the tools that modern chimpanzees use. These tools were probably used to crack bones to eat the marrow. Some paleontologists believe that these bones were mainly scavenged from large predators. That is to say, a lion would kill an animal, and after it left the carcass, humans would come and crack the bones with stones to eat the marrow. As intelligence increased, these tools improved and could be used for much more complicated food gathering activities such as hunting or stripping meat off the bone. Second, people discovered fire and cooking. This gives an enormous boost in nutrition. You get much more nutrition out of the foods you eat when you cook them. Many species, including people, prefer cooked food to raw food. When you feed rats a diet of cooked food rather than a natural diet, they tend to get fat. If we did not have cooking I do not think we would have survived with such large brains. Once we developed cooking, the survival of the species was assured, despite the large energy cost of a large brain. See "Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human" by R. Wrangham. - Jed
