One of the earliest known evidence of cooking has been discovered at an archaeological site in Israel, scientists report in a research published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution.
“The shift from eating raw to cooked food was a dramatic turning point in human evolution, and the discovery has suggested prehistoric humans were able to deliberately make fires to cook food at least 780,000 years ago,” CNN’s Katie Hunt notes.
According to the author of the study, Dr. Irit Zohar, a researcher at Tel Aviv University’s Steinhardt Museum of Natural History, a comprehensive “study of fish teeth unearthed at the Gesher Benot Ya’aqov site indicate that some of our early ancestors — most likely Homo erectus — were able to cook fish.”
Zohar confirms that while no human remains had been found at the site, the stone tools matched those found at Homo erectus sites across Africa.
According to archaeological geochemist Dr. Bethan Linscott, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford, the discovery is incredibly important. “Evidence for the controlled use of fire in the (early Stone Age) … is ephemeral at best, and as such, the evidence of anthropogenically (because of human activity) accumulated and cooked fish remains described here will undoubtedly have a wide impact on the research community,” he argues.
Before this research, “the earliest hard evidence of the use of fire to cook was by Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, who cooked starchy roots in what’s now South Africa about 170,000 years ago.”
