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Clues at Ancient Lake Site Reveal Earliest Known Cooked Meal
Scientists have found the earliest known evidence of cooking at an archaeological site in Israel. The discovery has suggested prehistoric humans were able to deliberately make fires to cook food at least 780, 000 years ago.
The detailed study of fish teeth unearthed at the Gesher Benot Ya' aqov site revealed that some of our early ancestors — most likely Homo erectus ( 直立猿人) believed to be the first hominin ( 古人族) (migrate) outside Africa — were able to cook fish, said Dr. Irit Zohar, a researcher at Tel Aviv University' s Steinhardt Museum of Natural History.
No human remains ( find) at the site before, but the stone tools matched found at Homo erectus sites across Africa, Zohar said. She said the lake would have been shallow, and it might have been easy to catch large fish like the extinct Luciobarbus longiceps, which grow up to. 5 feet (2 meters), by hand.
This is an incredibly important discovery the shift to eating cooked meals meant humans spent less energy on the intensive work of searching for and digesting raw food, freeing up . Diet has had a big impact on the evolution of our species. It has been suggested the consumption of meat in particular contributed to the increase in relative brain size of our early Homo ancestors — but they risked ( contract) diseases while consuming the uncooked meat which was likely to be contaminated by infective bacteria, " Linscott said.
"Cooking, however, kills bacteria and increases the energetic value of meat, ( create) a new reliable food source for early hominins. Understanding when this happened is therefore a topic of great interest, because it might help to explain our hominin ancestors evolved the way in which they did. "
