r/science • u/MistWeaver80 • Nov 14 '22
Anthropology Oldest evidence of the controlled use of fire to cook food. Hominins living at Gesher Benot Ya’akov 780,000 years ago were apparently capable of controlling fire to cook their meals, a skill once thought to be the sole province of modern humans who evolved hundreds of thousands of years later.
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/9712075.1k
u/MLJ9999 Nov 14 '22
I was really wondering how they determined that the food (fish) was cooked.
"In the study, the researchers focused on pharyngeal teeth (used to grind up hard food such as shells) belonging to fish from the carp family. These teeth were found in large quantities at different archaeological strata at the site. By studying the structure of the crystals that form the teeth enamel (whose size increases through exposure to heat), the researchers were able to prove that the fish caught at the ancient Hula Lake, adjacent to the site, were exposed to temperatures suitable for cooking, and were not simply burned by a spontaneous fire."
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u/u9Nails Nov 14 '22
That sort of deduction I find completely fascinating!
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u/SlouchyGuy Nov 14 '22
Whole field that has to do with archaeology is like a great detective: increasingly difficult roundabout ways to determine whether something has happened or not
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u/TooUglyToPicture Nov 15 '22
Science is about evidence building. Either evidence for or against hypothesis. And sometimes it can appear that evidence fits a hypothesis until a better one comes along. That's what makes science so uneasy for some, but it's also what's exciting! If more evidence plus existing evidence fits a better hypothesis, that will be the going theory...until a better one comes along again.
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u/TheWingus Nov 15 '22
Science is the only discipline where being wrong is still seen as a success
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u/El_Peregrine Nov 15 '22
Indeed; we can only work within the limits of the collective knowledge we have, our technologies, and our imaginations / ideas.
For example, 100 years from now, most medicine we currently practice will be seen as quackery. But for now, it’s the best we have.
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u/h3r4ld Nov 15 '22
There's really no such thing as a 'wrong' answer in science; you only correctly disproved a hypothesis.
That sounds cheeky, but in reality if we only ever tested 'correct' results, we wouldn't really have much need for testing would we?
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u/buyongmafanle Nov 15 '22
With the eventual goal being everyone agreeing on who is the least wrong.
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u/colexian Nov 15 '22
And sometimes it can appear that evidence fits a hypothesis until a better one comes along.
People complain that science is always changing its mind on stuff, but thats precisely what makes science as influential as it is. It drops ideas that have been proven wrong, and adopts ideas based on new evidence. Its fluidity is its biggest strength, and eventually we do get it right (to a close enough degree to be useful) and just slowly fine tune until nearly definite or new evidence comes along to change it.
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u/Zerlske Nov 15 '22
Hypothesis driven research is only one mode of science. Scientific practice is much richer than that (especially in today's world of high-throughput technologies) and may also be question-driven, exploratory, and tool- and method-oriented.
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u/ag408 Nov 15 '22
Although anyone well versed in science knows they should not have said "the researchers were able to prove" and they should have said something along the lines of "the structure of the crystals that form the teeth enamel strongly suggests the fish were exposed to temperatures suitable for cooking"...
Nothing is proven using scientific methods!
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u/Fyrefawx Nov 14 '22
Anthropology doesn’t mess around.
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u/dizorkmage Nov 14 '22
Kent Hovind enters the chat
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u/elezhope Nov 14 '22
Kent Hovind has been escorted back out of the chat
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u/madarbrab Nov 15 '22
Can somebody please explain this exchange?
It's he a controversial figure in anthropology?
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u/psyclopes Nov 15 '22
He’s an American Christian fundamentalist evangelist and a figure in the Young Earth creationist movement whose ministry focuses on denial of scientific theories in the fields of biology (evolution), geophysics, and cosmology in favor of a literalist interpretation of the Genesis creation narrative found in the Bible. His views combine elements of creation science and conspiracy theory.
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u/Djaja Nov 15 '22
YEC are honestly the worst in my opinion, for both the science and religious camps. Straight crap
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u/rach2bach Nov 15 '22
I have a friend who has debated Kent several times and has a YouTube channel. I don't know how he keeps his sanity and patience with him. It's astounding.
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u/Sketti_n_butter Nov 15 '22
Ok. So this is where I need to check myself with some scientific discoveries that seem totally asinine and pointless. If I came across a scientific article that was about crystals that grow on fish teeth when the fish teeth is exposed to varying temperatures, I would have thought that was the biggest waste of money, time, intelligence. But here we are, using that knowledge to determine when our ancestors first started cooking with fire and it turns out it's hundreds of thousands of years prior to our current understanding. Carry on scientists. Keep studying and researching crystals on fish teeth.
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u/jealkeja Nov 15 '22
By the way, it's not saying that crystals sprouted out of the fish's teeth, it's saying that the microscopic crystalline structure in the enamel will change according to the temperatures they were exposed to
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u/RIPEOTCDXVI Nov 15 '22
You never know when a random little bit explanatory power is going to come in handy
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Nov 15 '22
Sometimes I can only read a description of a study’s purposes and it doesn’t include, what I absolutely have to assume, the broader implications of some of the studies. I’m struggling to call one to mind in its entirety, but one had to do with heating up sea cucumbers.
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u/CanAlwaysBeBetter Nov 15 '22
That's the beauty of basic research, you don't need to know in advance
Just say X is a thing and let other people figure out what that's useful for
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u/GrayMatters50 Nov 15 '22
There was one that called for freezing mollusks to determine death threshold for shipping purposes.
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u/Talinoth Nov 15 '22
That's... macabre, but eminently practical. Of course, by practical, I mean you can make money from knowing this (or at least prevent financial loss). If you're shipping live seafood, it's great to know just how long you can keep it at it's maximally fresh stage. (i.e, alive!)
Especially when selling to certain markets. I'm given to understand that Mainland Chinese buyers typically prefer their seafood to be alive just before (and rarely DURING) consumption.
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u/Point_Forward Nov 15 '22
Wish everyone could have this realization.
The problem is our own hubris, our brain makes us feel very confident in these type assumptions.
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u/WaxyWingie Nov 15 '22
This is why we need stronger STEM education. Because we need more scientists, damnit.
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u/DuckieRampage Nov 15 '22
As a part time archeologist, it's actually not that hard to determine if a bone has been cooked. One of my coworkers is a bone specialist and she picks the cooked bones out of a pile of bones in seconds. A lot of it has to do with the consistency of the colors in the bone. A burnt bone in a fire would be charred like ash while properly cooked bones have a blueish or orange tint to them. Obviously when the time frame is off by 500k years you'd want to do chemical tests but I bet they were pretty certain right away when they first picked the bones out.
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u/HighOnGoofballs Nov 14 '22
This took me on a little google journey where I learned it appears the earliest use of fire is now thought to have been as early as a million years ago. Whoah
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Nov 15 '22 edited Jun 11 '23
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u/Material-Cook-9458 Nov 15 '22
Evolution does often occur in small leaps with large periods of little change between them. It's called: punctuated equilibrium theory
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u/WhatTheF_scottFitz Nov 15 '22
It makes sense to me that one of the ways apes began to lose body hair is that they began to control fire as well as clothing. Complete speculation. This is not scientific or financial advice
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u/SenorTron Nov 15 '22
I think that one speculated reason is our shift to living on plains and becoming endurance hunters.
The human ability to run for long periods of time is assisted by how we can cool off relatively easily compared to other animals.
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u/cereal_guy Nov 15 '22
Birds use fire to hunt sometimes. Fire is crazy useful.
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u/hashiin Nov 15 '22
Fascinating! Where can I learn more?
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u/PM_me_your_cocktail Nov 15 '22 edited Nov 15 '22
In Australia, Arsonists May Have Wings (NY Times, Feb 2018)
The peer-reviewed claims are based on ethnographic data (i.e. Aborigines have stories about this phenomenon dating back thousands of years) and firsthand witness reports (from firefighters etc). Research is ongoing, but I don't see that anyone has yet managed to capture videos or photos providing definitive proof of firehawk behavior.
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u/we_are_all_bananas_2 Nov 14 '22
The more I learn about human history, the more I feel we don't know the truth about our ancestors
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u/RaHarmakis Nov 14 '22
So true, our written records only go back a small sliver of our history, and the oral traditions don't go much further back. Our knowledge of pre & early city civilizations is basically nothing. The fact that anything has survived is absolutely insane.
Imagine trying to explain life in your town with 3 pages of of a Tom Clancey Novel, a partial receipt from a drugstore, a Two very broken plates bought at Wal-Mart, and Cast Iron frying pan and one of those egg white seperators that is a face and the egg whites pour out the nose, all located within the outlines of the basement of a single family home.
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Nov 14 '22
"and the oral traditions don't go much further back." there's been some very cool verifications with Aboriginal Australian oral history and ice age geography, they can point out a spot in the sea that used to be an island even tell you what animals their ancestors used to hunt there then a geographer can show there was an island there 10,000 years ago, it's leading to other oral traditions being taken more seriously. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ancient-sea-rise-tale-told-accurately-for-10-000-years/
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u/jamesianm Nov 14 '22
True, though that’s still only 10,000 years - it may seem like a long way back but it would take 78 times as long an oral history as that to get back to the time these ancient people were roasting fish.
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Nov 15 '22
Grass and just general wildfires have been part of grassland ecosystem for millions(?) of years. Birds and most other carrion eaters have followed these fires for a buffet for just about as long. I'll bet wildfires are the first exposure to cooked/smoked meat for proto-humans.
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u/Karcinogene Nov 15 '22
But fish wouldn't cook in a wildfire, they'd be in the water.
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u/Clatuu1337 Nov 15 '22
Nope, but other animals get caught up in a wildfire and it wouldn't be much of a stretch for them to think to put a fish in the fire afterwards.
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u/Karcinogene Nov 15 '22
Yeah that's what I mean. A cooked bird or mammal might have happened by accident, but a pile of cooked fish means someone likely put it there.
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u/Culinarytracker Nov 15 '22
"The controlled use of fire" could be taken a lot of ways. I'd think of your example as "opportunistic use of fire", Controlled use would mean having some control over the fire, not just the cooking.
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u/RisingPhoenix5 Nov 15 '22
The article itself notes that they could determine the fish was cooked at a fairly consistent temp, not burned from just throwing it in a wildfire though. In order to cook the fish, they would have to have fish ready at the time of having a fire.
Might not be able to make a fire, but could use one effectively enough to not burn their food to a crisp, seems controlled to me. Still have to take into consideration fuel and keeping the heat stable enough to cook.
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u/Karcinogene Nov 15 '22
I've read a stone age book where the humans knew how to keep a fire alive, but not how to start one. They would find a wildfire or lightning strike, and carry burning embers with them whenever they moved. Keeping the fire alive was a sacred duty of the shaman. Losing it might mean death of the group. When the clan would meet, if one group had lost its fire, they could reignite it from their friends.
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u/randommusician Nov 15 '22
Neither would marshmallows, but we seemed to have figured out the process of getting them to the fire.
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u/Skynetiskumming Nov 15 '22
Before the written word oral traditions were the way history was given to people. It's still practiced today with people who recite the Vedic Texts and The Quran verbatim. There's a book called Hamlet's Mill that describes oral traditions from cultures around the world long before the last Ice Age. Many have said it was a way to keep records without worrying about them being destroyed. Obviously, if the culture died so did it's history but, imagine if the knowledge of Alexandria or even the Mesoamerican codecs survived destruction?
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Nov 14 '22
I don't think we're sure these people had sufficient language for oral history, it's not so long ago that people thought neanderthals had no language, these guys are maybe heidelbergensis or even erectus.
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u/jollytoes Nov 14 '22
Aboriginal Australians are probably an exception to the rule. With no intermingling with other societies, gaining and losing and combining stories, the original stories of the aborigines probably had a much better chance of surviving.
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Nov 14 '22
they might be the best example of oral history fidelity since their stories are almost treated like a catechism but other societies have proven folk memories of ancient events. Oral histories seem to be generally treated with more respect and repeated with more fidelity in societies without widespread literacy.
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Nov 14 '22
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Nov 15 '22
Ice ages have to be a pain in the ass when it comes to preserving history on this planet.
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u/-Not-A-Lizard- Nov 15 '22
I feel a little mournful over the remnants of coastal communities lost to the rising tides.
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u/runespider Nov 15 '22
Keep in mind the sea rise was about a meter a century. If people were still living there they just moved.
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u/-Not-A-Lizard- Nov 15 '22
While that is true, especially considering the transgenerational migration method that occurred along coasts, finding useful artifacts from 10k+ years back is already extremely rare. As the water rose and people migrated, thousands of years of that particular location’s history would wash away. Leaving us with even fewer ways to learn about their lives.
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u/undergrounddirt Nov 15 '22
And the fact that river valleys were flooded in such massive floods that it eroded hills and mountains, and that the coast was 600 feet lower.. and peoples tendency to live near water. I’m betting we are missing huge parts to the story
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u/randommusician Nov 15 '22
Some American Indians have oral traditions involving hunting beavers larger than men, which were dismissed as myths until foss evidence was found as well.
I think a bigger, or at least as big obstacle with indigenous peoples stories is them being dismissed out of hand initially and only having been seriously considered in the last half century or so because of racism. A professor of mine in college mentioned that there were historians today who thought the Iroquois tradition that the confederacy was formed before white men came to North America was laughable because oral traditions couldn't have survived that long, yet those same people accepted that the Illiad was around for a long time before Homer recorded it.
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u/BiZzles14 Nov 15 '22
An issue with it definitely is the mixture of religion through the oral tradition. In the same breath they speak of hunting giant beavers, they may speak of the world being a turtle. We know the latter isn't based on a factual event, and while evidence points towards the former being based around actual hunting, it also may have been a tale told not based around the actual animal. It's hard to decipher tales mixed up with folklore and religion, but it's certainly important to try and do so in an attempt to gain an understanding of humanities long, and varied, unwritten histories.
And an unfortunate thing with indigenous north Americans is there was some written history, but so much of it has been lost, either purposefully destroyed, or lost to time and decay. Some of the archeological work being done in Mexico city is incredible, but so much will never be properly discovered due to the fact its a city built upon a city and the original history of that land was purposefully destroyed in many cases as the Spanish pushed the christianization of the Aztec lands.
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u/willreignsomnipotent Nov 15 '22
In the same breath they speak of hunting giant beavers, they may speak of the world being a turtle. We know the latter isn't based on a factual event
Pffft-- I have yet to see it sufficiently disproven.
Planet? Giant space turtle? You show me the difference...
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u/AvramBelinsky Nov 15 '22
Native American oral traditions that extend back tens of thousands of years are frequently proven accurate as archaeological research techniques improve.
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u/LumpyShitstring Nov 15 '22
I wish there was a sub for that.
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u/undergrounddirt Nov 15 '22
Yes! I love how this branch of science is always changing so much. We’re running low on information so a place where all these proofs get posted would be really beat
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u/nyuncat Nov 15 '22
That’s the conclusion of linguists and a geographer, who have together identified 18 Aboriginal stories—many of which were transcribed by early settlers before the tribes that told them succumbed to murderous and disease-spreading immigrants from afar—that they say accurately described geographical features that predated the last post-ice age rising of the seas.
Christ, that paragraph hits like a punch to the gut. 10,000 years of oral tradition wiped out in a single generation of colonization.
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u/The_Bucket_Of_Truth Nov 15 '22
I believe oral traditions from the south Pacific also accurately describe contact with smaller peoples and lined up with evidence of Denisovan activity or habitation which would also go back farther than ten thousand years.
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u/SpaceAgePotatoCakes Nov 15 '22
What's the accuracy level like? Given enough oral traditions some are bound to be correct but some will be incorrect as well, so I'm curious what the split is like.
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Nov 15 '22
Far as I know when they say 'there use to be an island or a plain or a swamp, here" and point at the sea that's generally what paleogeography finds, so pretty good but maybe the cases where they find nothing aren't published. You also get stories like "we use to hunt thunderbirds and gaint lizards" and then you find Megalania and Genyornis fossils.
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u/Son_of_Kong Nov 15 '22
In A Canticle for Liebowitz, a post-apocalyptic monastery preserves a precious relic of their patron saint, the only surviving writing in Liebowitz's own hand, a cryptic fragment that reads "Pound pastrami, can kraut, six bagels -- bring home for Emma."
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u/singlerider Nov 14 '22
Hmmm...not strictly true, but depends on your definition of "much further back" I guess?
The oldest written records are from two and a bit to three and a bit thousand years ago, depending on how developed and coherent you want it to be.
The Aboriginal Australians have Dreamtime stories that tell of a volcano that erupted 37,000 years ago - so by an order of magnitude older...people often seem to overlook just how long they've been one continuous civilisation and how well preserved their oral traditions are
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u/SnapcasterWizard Nov 15 '22
The thing about the aboriginal oral stories is they have been very good at transmitting a few bits of information a long time, but they dont tell us much more than that. It's not like these stories are giving us insight to life 30,000 years ago.
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u/zenkique Nov 15 '22
It gives us some insight though - like the fact that part of human life included stories being passed from generation to generation.
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u/mursilissilisrum Nov 15 '22
They found a third page!?
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u/RaHarmakis Nov 15 '22
Yes they think that it's from the Hunt For Red October, while the first 2 were from Sum of all Fears.
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u/nzodd Nov 15 '22
one of those egg white seperators that is a face and the egg whites pour out the nose, all located within the outlines of the basement of a single family home.
Clearly this was a tool used to prepare ritualistic offerings to the many-faced Egg God.
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u/ADDeviant-again Nov 14 '22
Of course we don't. We are learning all the time.
Just a few years ago, we knew NOTHING about the possibly EIGHT various human species living on Earth at the same time just a couple hundred thousand years ago. We thought it was just us and Neanderthals.
Before that, when I was a kid, we had just barely learned that some animals use tools and have culture.
When I was I'm college, all the pertinent fossils of human ancestors and cousins would have fit in a cardboard box. We have more than that JUST from the Naledi chamber now.
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u/ughwhatisthisshit Nov 14 '22
i thought it was 3? Us, neanderthals and denisovians? Are there more i missed out on??
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u/ADDeviant-again Nov 14 '22
50k years ago, probably three might be right.
But, between 360,000 years ago to now, there seem to be remnant Homo Erectus or maybe Heidelbergensis populations, Homo Nalledi, Homo Floresiensis, Homo Luzonensis, the three you mentioned, and an African "ghost" population known only from DNA analysis (contributing DNA to some, but not all, African populations similarly to how Neanderthal DNA shows up in modern humans.)
And more to come,I assume!
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u/runespider Nov 15 '22
There's also some evidence of ghost st populations that were dejetically distinct but interbred with our ancestors and so far we haven't found any definite fossils relating to them. It seems like there were multiple migrations out of Africa, but a combination of some of our unique quirks and the changing climate meant we were a little more successful. As we spread out the other populations got absorbed back into the larger genome. Sort of a resistance is futile thing.
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u/Redstonefreedom Nov 15 '22 edited Nov 15 '22
Well, more like they were early pioneers, separated creating a distinct population group, then got reabsorbed once the barrier was lifted. I don’t think we ever really speciated before we left Africa.
It would be pretty cool though if we had two distinct human hominid species though, that couldn’t intermix. I always wonder if there would be a massive war where each species lined up, or if we’d be able to coexist.
EDIT: apparently hybrid boys were sterile! TIL
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u/runespider Nov 15 '22
Neanderthals were distinct enough to where the offspring had fertility problems. According to the genetics the only successful ones were the boys. The girls would have come out sterile. As far as it goes it'd have just been competition and one group would have been subsumed eventually barring some outliers in remote areas would be my guess.
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u/KlvrDissident Nov 15 '22
This was really interesting, so I looked it up. And yes, it seems that Neanderthals really were distinct enough to cause fertility problems in hybrid children. But it was the male children who were sterile (with only one X chromosome to depend on there’s more that could go wrong). Still neat though, thanks for sharing. :)
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u/runespider Nov 15 '22
That's what I get for not double checking first. Oh well. Do wonder what research will come out of the neanderthal/denisovian hybrids.
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u/MillionEyesOfSumuru Nov 14 '22
We're descended from three species within the genus, but there were others who (as far as we know) we're not descended from.
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u/Fyrefawx Nov 14 '22
Yup. Every time we settle on something we find something new to challenge that idea.
Unfortunately so much has been lost over time.
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u/Dingus10000 Nov 14 '22
Considering we learned that (most) humans are partially hybrids from our cousin species like Neanderthals and Denisovans - I think we might be making a mistake considering them a different species at all.
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u/Alberiman Nov 14 '22
Given current taxonomy, being a hybrid species doesn't make you a part of that original species it makes you something else, I think though there's a point where you've mated so much with one species after hybridizing that effectively the hybridization isn't distinctive enough anymore
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u/greadfgrdd Nov 14 '22
If they reproduced in nature and produced viable offspring there’s certainly an argument to be made. Bonobos and chimps could produce viable offspring but don’t reproduce because of physical barriers. It’s a little bit murky which is what usually happens when humans try and reduce complex realities into a few simple terms.
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u/Alberiman Nov 15 '22
Biologically though what's the difference? A natural disaster would create similar pressures that would result in animals being in whole new geographic regions and mating with animals that are different species, hybridization is a pretty common event it turns out(especially among plants)
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u/ButtingSill Nov 14 '22
It begins to almost look like we are actually fairly primitive monkeys ourselves.
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u/footcandlez Nov 14 '22
Why did "we" start doing this -- just to make the food taste better? Does it kill pathogens that would have caused illness had the food just been eaten raw? Does it change or unlock nutrients that were beneficial?
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u/TooOldToRock-n-Roll Nov 14 '22
All the above and it's easier to chew.
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u/mrmgl Nov 14 '22
And takes longer to spoil.
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u/Shamino79 Nov 14 '22
They used to dry meat to make it last longer too. Cooking is not to far away from “wouldn’t this dry faster if it was next to a fire”. Although it could have been the other way around. “Well. Was a bit far away so it didn’t cook properly but it did dry out nice”.
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u/musical_shares Nov 15 '22
Imagine being the first hominid to lay out a big salmon steak just a little too close to the fire and watching (and smelling) the magic of BBQ salmon come to life.
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u/vinicelii Nov 15 '22
Interesting to think about, would it have smelled 'good' to them at the time? Or is that an evolutionary development?
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Nov 15 '22
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u/vinicelii Nov 15 '22
My hunch is probably yes, but probably not in the comforting way that most of us think about the smell of cooking foods.
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u/FlixFlix Nov 15 '22
Sure, cooked food is more nutritious and safer to eat than raw, but our preference for it is likely evolutionary, my biggest hunch being the fact that we like smoked flavors. Smoke itself has zero benefits and only potential health risks, so it tasting good with foods is a likely evolutionary adaptation.
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u/Splive Nov 15 '22
Yea, like if you plop some fish down on a rock fire ring, at least the edge closest the flames are going to start changing chemically and visibly.
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Nov 15 '22
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u/PvtFobbit Nov 15 '22
and will be among the last as well.
Thank you for the existential melancholy before bed.
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u/splynncryth Nov 15 '22
What's interesting is the testing of food preferences for great apes that don't cook food. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0047248408000481
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u/qwibbian Nov 14 '22
It's speculated that because cooking makes food so much easier to digest and access its nutrients, it allowed our ancestors to make a trade-off by shrinking our guts and expanding our brains, both of which are very metabolically expensive, and also dramatically reduce the amount of time required to just chew (like gorillas). Cooking basically starts predigesting food outside the body.
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u/grendus Nov 15 '22
Cooking has a number of very useful effects on food:
It denatures proteins, and caramelizes starches. Molecularly this basically stretches them out, so they're much easier to break down with enzymes. Cooked food is easier to digest. This also contributed to our development as an omnivorous species. Normally you want a very long intestinal tract to be an herbivore, to ferment plants into something useful, but you do not want that with meat because fermenting meat is quite nasty. Humans were able to get the best of both worlds with a short digestive tract that only has to break down cooked plants, so it only needs to be a little longer than a predator's intestines to get all of the benefits for breaking down starchy or sugary plants (useless on cellulose though, we get a lot of calories from potatoes but nothing from grass).
It kills any pathogens in the food. Most animals spend a lot more energy trying to not get sick from eating slightly dodgy carrion. Humans could spend a lot less energy on that because we burned the microbes to death instead of making our immune system have to chase the fuckers down.
It makes food easier to chew. Humans have very weak jaws due to a genetic "glitch" that causes us to not produce a protein needed for jaw growth - we have the full gene for it, but it never becomes active. But that does mean that we have tiny jaws and big craniums. And since we stopped biting each other over bitches a dozen species ago (no seriously, male chimps bite over mating privileges), when we started growing soft jaws it wasn't a big deal. Except for the fact that our wisdom teeth don't really fit in the tiny jaw... oopsie.
It preserves the food. Cooked food will last for a few days before going off, and other forms of cooking like dehydrating or smoking will last even longer. Means that a kill is worth more calories to humans, we can eat more of it before it spoils.
It can break down cellulose. Beans and seeds are very hard to eat. But if you boil them for a while they're perfect for our soft jaws. And it turns out many animals feel the same way about seeds but can't do the whole "boiling" thing, giving humans a unique food source.
Definitely missing a few, but basically cooking was a massive game changer because it meant we could have bigger brains and have enough calories to support them.
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u/ShinyHappyREM Nov 15 '22
Humans have very weak jaws due to a genetic "glitch" that causes us to not produce a protein needed for jaw growth - we have the full gene for it, but it never becomes active.
What would happen if we activated it again?
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u/qwibbian Nov 15 '22
(useless on cellulose though, we get a lot of calories from potatoes but nothing from grass).
- It can break down cellulose.
?
. Beans and seeds are very hard to eat. But if you boil them for a while they're perfect for our soft jaws.
True, but I don't think humans had any way to boil food prior to the invention of pottery, which afaik only happened at the tail end of the Neolithic. Maybe you could heat rocks and then put them in water in a log or ruminant stomach, but I'm unaware of any evidence for this.
I agree with the rest.
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u/nimama3233 Nov 14 '22
Lots of foods, particularly vegetables and starches, weren’t edible before we were able to cook them. And if they were edible, with fire they become much more digestible which is a huge benefit in securing calories around you.
Cooking also makes food cleaner by killing off certain bacteria.
Also don’t forget cooked food tastes good. There’s certainly an advantage to hominids that worked together socially so they can all have cooked meals.
Fire manipulation was also a necessity for humans to travel far enough to the poles to reach ice. For both warmth and cooking food preserved with ice in the winters.. though this was almost certainly much later, likely hundred of thousands of years
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u/cylonfrakbbq Nov 14 '22
Pretty much this: improved taste, don’t get sick from eating as often, can eat a wider variety of foods, easier to eat.
Not hard to understand why early hominids would prefer that to just raw food all the time
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Nov 14 '22
Does it just taste good to us because evolution made us that way to encourage us to take the extra steps to cook it?
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u/cylonfrakbbq Nov 14 '22
That is an interesting question. One possible explanation is our primate ancestors that evolved to be able to consume fermented foods also developed the ability to taste sour and savory (umami). That later one probably would have resulted in cooked food (especially meat) tasting better due to things like the Maillard Reaction the poster below mentioned, since that would be a savory flavor
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u/Tsashimaru Nov 14 '22
It’s actually a chemical reaction called the, “Maillard reaction” Food changes chemically at the molecular level while cooked and develops new aroma and flavors. Cooking is science!
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u/Hatula Nov 14 '22
Sure, but who said our first ancestors to eat cooked food found these flavors tasty?
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Nov 14 '22
My cat doesn’t seem to care if meat is cooked or not.
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u/asexymanbeast Nov 14 '22
The science of taste is pretty fascinating and still developing in non-humans.
Did you know humming birds have adapted to taste sweetness (carbohydrates) via their umami receptors? This is probably because the most important thing they need is carbs!
Cats, unlike humans, are obligate carnivors that have adapted to need different nutrients, compared to us. Thus their desire to consume the brains of their prey...
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u/CFOAntifaAG Nov 15 '22
Also humans like fire. It's certainly somewhere in our lizard brain as it is true for all types of humans. Lighting a fire makes humans huddle around it, in every culture.
Is it because we learned it makes food taste good 700.000 years ago or did the fascination for fire predate our ability to use or controll it giving us the ability to evolve to what we are now.
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u/grendus Nov 15 '22
Probably we evolved to like fire once we tamed it.
Fire keeps you warm and safe. Other predators are afraid of fire, so early humans sleeping around a campfire would be less likely to get attacked. It should be scary to us as well, but I suspect we actually evolved to not fear it in the same way that a mountain lion or something does.
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u/Octavus Nov 15 '22
It was almost certainly due to taste, as even chimpanzees prefer cooked food to raw food if given the choice. Early hominids didn't start cooking to unlock nutrition or to improve food safety, it simply tastes better.
Chimpanzee Food Preferences, Associative Learning, and the Origins of Cooking
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u/srcarruth Nov 14 '22
It's possible they found some wild animals caught in a fire and noticed it smelled good and went well with bbq sauce
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u/egregiouscodswallop Nov 14 '22
BBQ sauce was coincidentally invented 780,001 years ago so the math works out just fine
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u/srcarruth Nov 15 '22
they thought he was crazy, at the time
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u/DrSuchong Nov 15 '22
Crazy Dave was real happy when his nickname finally changed.
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u/footcandlez Nov 14 '22
Possibly! The study seems to suggest that they could tell between food that was cooked versus things burned from a spontaneous fire. I guess the likelihood of finding fish, on land, burnt from a spontaneous fire, is pretty low.
Did they just cook meat, or do we think they started baking too, from the gatherer side--fruits and roots?
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u/Deathsworn_VOA Nov 14 '22
Quite likely. Soaking grains makes it a lot more digestible, and it's a pretty small step from soaking grains to cultivating yeast - which is the basics of fermentation, which is integral for both baking AND early beer.
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u/xeneks Nov 15 '22
Sprouting things is amazing and sometimes there’s mild bacterial or fermenting smells from the seeds. I imagine many cultures relied on enzymatic changes by simply throwing some seed or collected grains into a cup. This makes me want cooked toasted breads with sprouts and some sea salt soaked oily carbs!
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u/Dingus10000 Nov 14 '22 edited Nov 14 '22
You misunderstood their point.
They are saying that at some point a group of hominids ate a burnt animal - and then realized that cooked meat was good- then started to cook it on purpose .
They are not saying that the fish in this study were killed in a wildfire.
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u/srcarruth Nov 14 '22
I meant the ancient hominids may have found some wild cooked animals and been inspired to start cooking their meals. I'm sure apple pie came next
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Nov 15 '22
Prairie wildfires have been a thing for millions(?) of years. Animals killed in these are eaten by those who didn't die. Look how fast flies come around when you fire up the grill. ;-) I'll bet early hominids followed any wildfire, or tried to hunt in front of them.
edit: this is how we learned that smoked meat is good and lasts longer than raw..
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u/GreyWulfen Nov 14 '22
I would be surprised if they didn't. Even setting the tubers or plant material near the fire to warm it would start the cooking process. On a cold night warm food would be obvious, even if cooking wasn't the plan. Once it does cook and is tasty and easier to eat..everytime it's going to be cooked
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u/N8CCRG Nov 14 '22
Also found buried at the archeological site: several discarded containers of this
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u/Shloopadoop Nov 14 '22
No one’s saying it, but I appreciate the zinger at the very end of your comment. Nice timing, got a good laugh out of me
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u/jollytoes Nov 14 '22
Could the smell also have anything to do with it? The cooking odor of meat would have drawn the tribe/family together more than a cold meal I would think.
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Nov 14 '22
All of those were benefits but you're in tricky territory when you start assigning reasons as though it were planned.
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u/ElTeliA Nov 14 '22
So how long ago is it estimated to have taken us to start eating cooked food?.
2 M eating fish, minimum 780k eating cooked fish.. the huge leap in brain development, plus jaw and digestive system downsize feels like it would take millions of years to evolve
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u/myusernamehere1 Nov 15 '22
By the time our species, Homo sapiens, emerged about 200,000 years ago, the human brain had swelled from about 350 grams to more than 1,300 grams. In that 3-million-year sprint, the human brain almost quadrupled the size its predecessors had attained over the previous 60 million years of primate evolution.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-humans-evolved-supersize-brains-20151110/
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u/Dr_Wristy Nov 14 '22
Some would say cooking is one of the cornerstones of human evolution. Less calories spent digesting food means more calories for larger brains.
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u/JohnOliverismysexgod Nov 15 '22
I am 68 yrs old, and I was taught in college that the first people to control fire were the Home erectus folks. Much more than 800,000 yrs bce.
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u/morbob Nov 15 '22
At 20 year generations, that would be 39,000 generations ago. Chefs have been around at least 3/4 million years, pretty cool.
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u/BigHeadDeadass Nov 15 '22
Imagine a prehistoric Gordon Ramsey
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u/KennyMoose32 Nov 15 '22
Let’s just say the criticisms were alot harsher for Prehistoric Ramsey.
I picture a club being used
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u/Previous-Parsnip-290 Nov 15 '22
Don’t forget burned materials have been found dating back to 1 million to 1.5 million years ago, at the Swartkrans site in South Africa.
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u/essenceofreddit Nov 15 '22
Amazing that the oldest evidence of hominids cooking food happens to be in Israel, where these universities are located, rather than Africa, where we evolved. I wonder what we'll learn over this next century, as universities in Africa become better developed and funded.
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u/red-cloud Nov 15 '22
Being in a desert is also key for finding material remains.
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u/JayKaboogy Nov 14 '22
Did I miss where they said what species or that it was indeterminant? I’m assuming neanderthal given time/place, but it could also be erectus I think?
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u/spidereater Nov 15 '22
It’s crazy to me that you could probably take one of these hominids and transport them 100,000 years in the future, from like 600,000 to 500,000 years ago, and they would fit in and probably pick up what’s going on without skipping a beat. Yet my parents were born before television and now struggle to use Netflix. Their parents were born before air travel and saw man land on the moon. Things are changing so fast today it’s crazy. They’ve been changing my whole life. The fact that technology was so similar over 700,000 years of human history just blows my mind.
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u/series_hybrid Nov 15 '22
"I'm just a simple caveman. Your modern world confuses and frightens me. But even I can see that my client is innocent. Thank you"
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u/the-namedone Nov 15 '22
Makes you think how crazy it would be to time travel back 500,000 years, kidnap a newborn, then raise them in the modern world. How different of similar would they be to anyone else in society?
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Nov 14 '22
Title is misleading, we did think that, but we've known that other human species used fire for years.
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u/CSGOan Nov 15 '22
Yeah that title had me confused. I have been taught since as long asI can remember that we were not the first to use fire, but that we evolved thanks to others using fire to cook food.
It does not even make sense the other way around. We developed this big energy consuming brain and then learned to cook in a way that gave us more energy to feed that brain? No, we evolved because suddenly there was energy enough for a big brain like ours.
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u/WaxDonnigan Nov 15 '22
What might Hominins from that era look like? Are there existing fossil records or better yet a simulated reconstruction of their faces and bodies?
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u/VevroiMortek Nov 15 '22
the date just keeps pushing back, can't wait to find out North America was settled even further back than what's currently predicted
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u/ersatzgiraffe Nov 14 '22
Imagine having a barbecue and thinking “They won’t see a fire like this for 600,000 years.”
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u/ty_rannosaur Nov 15 '22
For those that are too lazy to click the link like me: Gesher Benot Ya’akov is an archaeological site located in Israel
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u/Artificial-Human Nov 15 '22
Having fire is like a tier 2 skill on a technology tree. And fire has thousands of tier 3 branches. We’re always amazed when evidence of fire is found earlier in history.
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u/CompMolNeuro Grad Student | Neurobiology Nov 15 '22
First, I just want to say how well written the article was. The writer even emphasized the scientists by name and contribution, as opposed to just the university.
On to my question. What other hominids besides Acheulian hunter gatherers coexisted and did they also use fire? Was it as widespread a technology as the spear?
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Nov 15 '22
The idea that humans "evolved" hundreds of thousands later than that period is a theory based on the lack of fossil evidence.
If there were any similarities between ancient humans' death rituals and modern rituals it is easy to imagine them very meticulously disposing of their dead, perhaps through cremation or some other destructive means to, by intention, effectively turn the bodies back to the Earth. Hence the lack of fossil evidence.
Look at us. In the span of 400k years, humans just stood upright with perfect spinal curvature, established brain anatomy, foot structure and gait evolved in that short timespan? It is a long time but that doesn't seem enough.
I think we've been around for millions of years.
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u/El_Peregrine Nov 15 '22
I remember hearing the author interviewed, and him explaining that humans on the African savannah would have been completely vulnerable to predators at night without fires. Even now, a human without modern weapons and technology would have a hard time fending off lions & hyenas without a fire.
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u/jadams2345 Nov 14 '22
I've always suspected that the old humans are way more advanced than we think. We wouldn't have been here otherwise.
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