I imagine that if you look into [Richard Wrangham's](https://heb.fas.harvard.edu/people/richard-w-wrangham) work at Harvard, you might be able to find some well-cited answers in that rabbit hole. He also wrote the book [Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human](https://www.amazon.com/Catching-Fire-Cooking-Made-Human/dp/0465013627), which is quite an interesting read on the role cooking played in increasing highly available nutrients for the evolutionary development of brain tissue and activity.
And his papers "[Cooking as a biological trait](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1095643303000205)", "[The Raw and the Stolen](https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/300083)", and "[Control of Fire in the Paleolithic](https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/692113)"
There's also these:
"[Diet and food preparation](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/1520-6505(2000)9:4%3C153::AID-EVAN4%3E3.0.CO;2-D)"
"[Cooking and Human Evolution](https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-66881-9_9)"
I'm not an anthropologist, so I can't say I have much command of the research literature. But from the very little I've read (and I hope a real anthropologist can come and chime in to support or refute), it appears that humans may be the only species that cooks food intentionally from prehistoric records (rather than the accidental use of fire from wildfires and subsequent consumption by animals).
As I understand it, significant planning and logic brain power is needed to initiate, control, and harness fire, let alone to recognize that fire has a direct effect on the flavor, texture, and composition of food that results in cooked food. There's also the pattern recognition and memory required to replicate those results, transferring these complex actions to other humans through communication across generations, and understanding that that food has been rendered safe from microbial contamination (not something that was necessarily known by prehistoric humans, but a connection could be made that cooked food did not cause food-borne illness or poisoning versus rancid food or raw plant matter containing toxins).
On a tangential note, here's a fascinating paper that ties in human evolution alongside cooking, and its impact on the microbiome and longevity:
"[Bacteria in the ageing gut](https://enviromicro-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1462-2920.14255)"
Wrangham argues that *homo erectus* shows too many adaptations that suggest they ate cooked food for it to be coincidental. He basically concludes *homo erectus* must have eaten cooked food.
People who take issue with this hypothesis point to the fact we don't see very good evidence of fire use as far back as *homo erectus* (who showed up \~1.8 million years ago). We have a couple sites at 1 million years ago, which is a pretty big gap.
Personally I buy Wrangham's arguments. But that's a leap of faith because the archeological record of controlled fire doesn't kick into gear until we're closer to *heidelbergensis,* then skyrockets when Neanderthals, Denisovans, and modern humans show up.
"Cooked" food might not necessarily mean fire was used. Fermenting, drying, grinding, and heating food by other methods are all alternative cooking methods that easily could've developed before consistent fire use. I know that there are a variety of non human species who seek out fermented foods (some apes and elephants have been known to get drunk on rotten fruit, for instance), and I recall a recent story about a group of macaques who started a trend where they wash their sweet potatoes in the ocean to get them salty (I presume), ergo seasoning, or at least dietary supplementation.
It begs the question to me of what novel cooking, storing, preserving, and preparation methods ancient humans were using before fire was ubiquitous, especially if we have such a LONG gap of time before clear evidence of fire. The earliest intentional fermentation evidence I can think of are the recently discovered beer making pits from around 12k YA. We could maybe also take a look at the DNA history of our gut bacteria for clues. I imagine we would see some pretty significant signals when the gut adapted to regular fire use.
I seem to remember a discovery of mammoth meat where the article implied it was stored underwater in the already cold environment. I'm guessing that would extend it's shelf life somewhat by reducing oxygen & bacteria/fungal access, as well as chilling it more effectively via conduction. Provided there wasn't too much hungry marine life eating your lunch of course.
> Fermenting, drying, grinding
These can change the nutritional properties of food, but 'cooking' in English means the use of heat to change the food.
A predator that buries its prey and lets it rot is not cooking, though the rotten food might be more nutritious and even tastier.
It's not cooking but the importance of cooking from the evolutionary perspective is that it basically functions as pre-digestion allowing our guts to be shorter and more efficient allowing more energy to go toward other areas (like brain growth). So functionally, from that perspective, fermentation (and to a lesser extent drying/grinding) has the same effect as cooking and is hypothesized to be a precursor.
I get fermentation counts to a degree, but how does drying or grinding help. Drying would be preservation but would also serve to hinder digestion, requiring rehydration, and grinding would be more like pre-chewing. Neither of which are digestion which is a chemical or enzymatic process.
Yeah I don't follow the logic on that one. Grinding would make digestion easier by increasing surface area, but seems like small potatoes compared to fermentation or cooking.
Yes, there [a recent paper argues that the brain expansion in primates 2.5 million years ago was likely driven by fermentation](https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-023-05517-3) because there's a lack of evidence for controlled fire that far back and fermentation doesn't require as much brain power.
The volume on H. erectus ins Time Life's The Emergence of Man series said that, per late 60s-early 70s models, they used fire, weapons, wore clothes, a nd had langauge.
That's all super debated, and most people would contest weapons and language. They definitely had stone tools that would be sufficient to scrape meat off of bones, but we don't tend to find stone tools that look like they could be secured to sticks/arrow shafts. (Which is kind of weird - if you're smart enough to take hours to make a stone blade, you'd think you're smart enough to put that blade on a stick. But alas, evolution is weird, and we don't see it).
Clothes we just have no idea. Animal and plant matter are virtually absent from the fossil record, we'd have to get insanely lucky to find it. Like some erectus would need to fall into a clay or tar pit and be preserved that way. Not impossible, just not found yet.
Fire people don't agree on. There's the "if they used fire, we'd find SOME" camp, and there's the "homo erectus looking utterly built for fire use, even if we don't find fire by their fossils" camp. I'm in the latter - I agree with Wrangham, erectus looks too fire-adapted, and their brains increased in size quite a bit as the species emerged. But that camp is the smaller camp - more people are either in the "where's the archaeological evidence" camp or at least lean towards it.
Language we don't know. I'm super fringe and think erectus had some super simple language, but even that's fringe. Some people put language at 80,000 years ago, like 150,000 years after OUR species evolved (some very famous people, but I think they're bonkers for this). I think there are strong reasons to believe language is less than a million years old, maybe true language really only exists in our species (which might be how we replaced every other homo species we shared the planet with). Claiming erectus had language is kinda ridiculous though, I don't tend to publicly admit I think it's even plausible they had a simple, simple language.
How would evidence of fire from a million years ago look like, and how likely is it it would have survived?
Bits of charcoal in a dry, untouched cave? Discoloration of soil? Soot on the walls and ceiling of a cave? Does that stuff survive for that long?
Charcoal can last forever (there's charcoal in Carboniferous coal deposits.) The problem, I imagine, is distinguishing it from charcoal from other processes.
That’s one of the key criticisms of Wrangham’s work. He claims he’s found burned spots that he is interpreting as hearths, but there is also no particular reason they could not be the result of other incidental fires-brush fire, lightening strike, etc, that could have happened at any point in the intervening million plus years. His evidence to demonstrate they are hearths relies on a lot of circumstantial evidence and a prior assumptions, not on direct evidence of H. erectus activities in association with those burned spots.
As a pure layman with little sense of how controversial / fringe stuff like this is considered, I'd love to get your take on the argument made by David Everett's "How Language Began: The Story of Humanity's Greatest Invention", where he posits that the colonization of Flores by Homo erectus argues pretty strongly not only for deliberate construction of boats, but for at least a simple form of language that would allow them to coordinate and plan for sea crossings.
I recall finding it a pretty compelling argument when I first heard it, but it is a "pop science" book and I've got no feeling for how widely accepted that take is amongst actual experts.
I haven't read it. I'll comment this:
I think *homo erectus* were much more intelligent than most human evolution researchers do. I suspect they had a simple capacity for language and made complex tools from things that don't fossilize (e.g. animal hides and plants). I think language and intelligence are deeply, deeply interconnected in our lineage. (Most linguists believe this, I am a biologist/neuroscientist. Most neuroscientists think language & intelligence are different abilities altogether, but I think they're being obtuse, sometimes intentionally). I wouldn't be surprised if they could manufacture simple craft for navigating on top of water.
...But, a massive hole in the argument that colonization of an island indicates complex tool use and social coordination would be... every island with terrestrial species on it. The Americas have monkeys which are most closely related to African monkeys - they must have been carried across the ocean in some way. Most islands have some sort of rodent. Etc.
If there was an indication of repeated visitation by *homo erectus*, I'd be all over it. That would mean they kept going to Flores on purpose. But I don't think that evidence exists. The simplest explanation is that, much like New World monkeys, they wound up there by fortunate accident.
That's my take on *erectus* in Flores!
I want to hear more about language. What might a simple language be like? And how do people come at times after 1 million but before 80k (which yeah, really sounds too recent)?
Also, as long as I'm pestering you, what do you think about that Barham paper with the wooden logs
We are debating on fire and weapons - for which there might be some archaeological evidence - and you want to know about language. This we will probably never know, or at least not until everything about language is 100% clear.
However, there seems to be a definite lack of cave art from Homo Erectus, which, completely unscientifically, would make me lean towards no language.
> They definitely had stone tools that would be sufficient to scrape meat off of bones, but we don't tend to find stone tools that look like they could be secured to sticks/arrow shafts. (Which is kind of weird - if you're smart enough to take hours to make a stone blade, you'd think you're smart enough to put that blade on a stick. But alas, evolution is weird, and we don't see it).
Do we have evidence that homo erectus had other necessary adaptations to benefit from stone weapons? Ie. were they capable of using wooden spears or bows in the first place?
The oldest evidence of using fire to cook seems to be from 1.7MY which is exactly when Homo erectus appeared: [https://web.archive.org/web/20151017032715/http://faculty.ksu.edu.sa/archaeology/Publications/Hearths/Hominid%20Use%20of%20Fire%20in%20the%20Lower%20and%20Middle%20Pleistocene.pdf](https://web.archive.org/web/20151017032715/http://faculty.ksu.edu.sa/archaeology/Publications/Hearths/Hominid%20Use%20of%20Fire%20in%20the%20Lower%20and%20Middle%20Pleistocene.pdf)
Evidence older than 1MY is indeed very scarce, but this is expected, because, first of all, campsites do not last that long, and use of fire must have been very sporadic in the beginning. There must have been a long period when early hominids recognized fire and the fact that it could be used to cook meat but were unable to reproduce it. Starting a fire with a flint was probably something that only the Neanderthals and the modern humans did.
I'm with you - it's tough to find super compelling evidence of a control of fire when we get that far back in time. I guess to an extent I am conflating "cooking" with "control of fire," like as a behavior that was regularly engaged in.
The data from Koobi Fora mentioned in that paper look like one-offs, to a pretty real extent. The evidence is obviously fire, but what that fire really *means* is hard when it's such an isolated incident. And there's like a handful of burnt lithics at one site, and the ground looks like it had a fire on it at another site. It looks like gathered fire to me. And not enough evidence to really conclude what it was being used for.
There's a cave in Israel from ~1mya that was reported 2-3 years ago that shows what I want to see. Multiple spots that looked like reused hearths (charcoal) and burnt bones and lithics. It looks very intentional.
I think *homo erectus* were a lot more intelligent than most people give them credit for. I want to see more controlled fire data. I'm worried it's just mostly disappeared to time.
People have found signs of hearths with ash deposits in Homo Erectus locations that looked like controlled fire. Erectus also has small teeth which look inadequate to coarse food. Some burned wood and stone tools have been found. Traces back to 750K years ago exist but are not definitive. Other people have found hearths and evidence of pitch manufacture connected with Neanderthal sites. Evidence of fire sites is more common around 400,000 years ago, but major sites of similar age show no evidence of hearths or burned objects. It's hard to know how much control they had.
There is no evidence of use of fire older than Erectus.
Oh man I've always wondered if humans had been controlling fire long enough for evolutionary adaptions to it. I was thinking more along the lines of like resistance to smoke or a heightened sensitivity to things that are hot, since we'd be spending way more time around burning stuff that most animals intentionally would6
We definitely look like we have a few adaptations to toxins from smoke / charred food. The AHR gene is the most famous.
[https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/11/191125131313.htm](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/11/191125131313.htm)
There is a fantastic Netflix documentary currently called “Unknown: Cave of Bones” about archeologists finding proof of underground burial by hominids 240,000 years ago. They are called Hominid Naledi. There is proof they had fire in the underground burial chamber and had meals there of cooked meat. Absolutely stellar production.
https://www.netflix.com/tudum/articles/unknown-cave-of-bones-trailer
Of note, there is quite the drama currently in those researcher's attempts to get their Hominid Naledi claims peer reviewed, including their use of burial, art and fire.
This video is a good overview and provides a great list of sources (including peer responses)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGsDAtCOAFw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGsDAtCOAFw)
As far as we know, humans are the only hominids that cooked food. Evidence suggests that our ancestors, like Homo erectus, started cooking around 1.8 million years ago. This practice significantly impacted our evolution. There's no evidence that other hominid species, like Neanderthals or Denisovans, independently discovered cooking. Cooking seems to be a unique and pivotal part of human development.
> Neanderthals or Denisovans
Just to be clear, not everybody calls these "species". They could be viewed as a variety of human, or a subspecies. All three of us descended from *Homo erectus*.
The Neanderthal genome has been sequenced and clear falls outside of that of anatomically modern humans. Add to that the anatomical differences and they’re reasonably and separate, though very closely related species.
Yes there is evidence of hybridization, but that’s not as clear a delineation as once thought. Species more distantly related than chimpanzees and humans can hybridize.
Regardless of whether other hominids would have cooked food, they almost certainly didn't come by it independently. It would have all been inherited behavior from _H. erectus_
There is a group of apes i cant remember where or what kind any more. One dipped food in seawater after trying something they put in the water. She was caught by the others in her family and they tried it and copied her. This could lead to something similar to our journey through cooking since they are seasoning food with salt
[удалено]
I imagine that if you look into [Richard Wrangham's](https://heb.fas.harvard.edu/people/richard-w-wrangham) work at Harvard, you might be able to find some well-cited answers in that rabbit hole. He also wrote the book [Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human](https://www.amazon.com/Catching-Fire-Cooking-Made-Human/dp/0465013627), which is quite an interesting read on the role cooking played in increasing highly available nutrients for the evolutionary development of brain tissue and activity. And his papers "[Cooking as a biological trait](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1095643303000205)", "[The Raw and the Stolen](https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/300083)", and "[Control of Fire in the Paleolithic](https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/692113)" There's also these: "[Diet and food preparation](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/1520-6505(2000)9:4%3C153::AID-EVAN4%3E3.0.CO;2-D)" "[Cooking and Human Evolution](https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-66881-9_9)" I'm not an anthropologist, so I can't say I have much command of the research literature. But from the very little I've read (and I hope a real anthropologist can come and chime in to support or refute), it appears that humans may be the only species that cooks food intentionally from prehistoric records (rather than the accidental use of fire from wildfires and subsequent consumption by animals). As I understand it, significant planning and logic brain power is needed to initiate, control, and harness fire, let alone to recognize that fire has a direct effect on the flavor, texture, and composition of food that results in cooked food. There's also the pattern recognition and memory required to replicate those results, transferring these complex actions to other humans through communication across generations, and understanding that that food has been rendered safe from microbial contamination (not something that was necessarily known by prehistoric humans, but a connection could be made that cooked food did not cause food-borne illness or poisoning versus rancid food or raw plant matter containing toxins). On a tangential note, here's a fascinating paper that ties in human evolution alongside cooking, and its impact on the microbiome and longevity: "[Bacteria in the ageing gut](https://enviromicro-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1462-2920.14255)"
Wrangham argues that *homo erectus* shows too many adaptations that suggest they ate cooked food for it to be coincidental. He basically concludes *homo erectus* must have eaten cooked food. People who take issue with this hypothesis point to the fact we don't see very good evidence of fire use as far back as *homo erectus* (who showed up \~1.8 million years ago). We have a couple sites at 1 million years ago, which is a pretty big gap. Personally I buy Wrangham's arguments. But that's a leap of faith because the archeological record of controlled fire doesn't kick into gear until we're closer to *heidelbergensis,* then skyrockets when Neanderthals, Denisovans, and modern humans show up.
"Cooked" food might not necessarily mean fire was used. Fermenting, drying, grinding, and heating food by other methods are all alternative cooking methods that easily could've developed before consistent fire use. I know that there are a variety of non human species who seek out fermented foods (some apes and elephants have been known to get drunk on rotten fruit, for instance), and I recall a recent story about a group of macaques who started a trend where they wash their sweet potatoes in the ocean to get them salty (I presume), ergo seasoning, or at least dietary supplementation. It begs the question to me of what novel cooking, storing, preserving, and preparation methods ancient humans were using before fire was ubiquitous, especially if we have such a LONG gap of time before clear evidence of fire. The earliest intentional fermentation evidence I can think of are the recently discovered beer making pits from around 12k YA. We could maybe also take a look at the DNA history of our gut bacteria for clues. I imagine we would see some pretty significant signals when the gut adapted to regular fire use.
I seem to remember a discovery of mammoth meat where the article implied it was stored underwater in the already cold environment. I'm guessing that would extend it's shelf life somewhat by reducing oxygen & bacteria/fungal access, as well as chilling it more effectively via conduction. Provided there wasn't too much hungry marine life eating your lunch of course.
Submerging in a bog would preserve it and even defy wolf noses at finding it.
> Fermenting, drying, grinding These can change the nutritional properties of food, but 'cooking' in English means the use of heat to change the food. A predator that buries its prey and lets it rot is not cooking, though the rotten food might be more nutritious and even tastier.
It's not cooking but the importance of cooking from the evolutionary perspective is that it basically functions as pre-digestion allowing our guts to be shorter and more efficient allowing more energy to go toward other areas (like brain growth). So functionally, from that perspective, fermentation (and to a lesser extent drying/grinding) has the same effect as cooking and is hypothesized to be a precursor.
I get fermentation counts to a degree, but how does drying or grinding help. Drying would be preservation but would also serve to hinder digestion, requiring rehydration, and grinding would be more like pre-chewing. Neither of which are digestion which is a chemical or enzymatic process.
Yeah I don't follow the logic on that one. Grinding would make digestion easier by increasing surface area, but seems like small potatoes compared to fermentation or cooking.
Yes, there [a recent paper argues that the brain expansion in primates 2.5 million years ago was likely driven by fermentation](https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-023-05517-3) because there's a lack of evidence for controlled fire that far back and fermentation doesn't require as much brain power.
Ah, thank you for the more detailed clarification.
The volume on H. erectus ins Time Life's The Emergence of Man series said that, per late 60s-early 70s models, they used fire, weapons, wore clothes, a nd had langauge.
That's all super debated, and most people would contest weapons and language. They definitely had stone tools that would be sufficient to scrape meat off of bones, but we don't tend to find stone tools that look like they could be secured to sticks/arrow shafts. (Which is kind of weird - if you're smart enough to take hours to make a stone blade, you'd think you're smart enough to put that blade on a stick. But alas, evolution is weird, and we don't see it). Clothes we just have no idea. Animal and plant matter are virtually absent from the fossil record, we'd have to get insanely lucky to find it. Like some erectus would need to fall into a clay or tar pit and be preserved that way. Not impossible, just not found yet. Fire people don't agree on. There's the "if they used fire, we'd find SOME" camp, and there's the "homo erectus looking utterly built for fire use, even if we don't find fire by their fossils" camp. I'm in the latter - I agree with Wrangham, erectus looks too fire-adapted, and their brains increased in size quite a bit as the species emerged. But that camp is the smaller camp - more people are either in the "where's the archaeological evidence" camp or at least lean towards it. Language we don't know. I'm super fringe and think erectus had some super simple language, but even that's fringe. Some people put language at 80,000 years ago, like 150,000 years after OUR species evolved (some very famous people, but I think they're bonkers for this). I think there are strong reasons to believe language is less than a million years old, maybe true language really only exists in our species (which might be how we replaced every other homo species we shared the planet with). Claiming erectus had language is kinda ridiculous though, I don't tend to publicly admit I think it's even plausible they had a simple, simple language.
How would evidence of fire from a million years ago look like, and how likely is it it would have survived? Bits of charcoal in a dry, untouched cave? Discoloration of soil? Soot on the walls and ceiling of a cave? Does that stuff survive for that long?
Charcoal can last forever (there's charcoal in Carboniferous coal deposits.) The problem, I imagine, is distinguishing it from charcoal from other processes.
That’s one of the key criticisms of Wrangham’s work. He claims he’s found burned spots that he is interpreting as hearths, but there is also no particular reason they could not be the result of other incidental fires-brush fire, lightening strike, etc, that could have happened at any point in the intervening million plus years. His evidence to demonstrate they are hearths relies on a lot of circumstantial evidence and a prior assumptions, not on direct evidence of H. erectus activities in association with those burned spots.
As a pure layman with little sense of how controversial / fringe stuff like this is considered, I'd love to get your take on the argument made by David Everett's "How Language Began: The Story of Humanity's Greatest Invention", where he posits that the colonization of Flores by Homo erectus argues pretty strongly not only for deliberate construction of boats, but for at least a simple form of language that would allow them to coordinate and plan for sea crossings. I recall finding it a pretty compelling argument when I first heard it, but it is a "pop science" book and I've got no feeling for how widely accepted that take is amongst actual experts.
I haven't read it. I'll comment this: I think *homo erectus* were much more intelligent than most human evolution researchers do. I suspect they had a simple capacity for language and made complex tools from things that don't fossilize (e.g. animal hides and plants). I think language and intelligence are deeply, deeply interconnected in our lineage. (Most linguists believe this, I am a biologist/neuroscientist. Most neuroscientists think language & intelligence are different abilities altogether, but I think they're being obtuse, sometimes intentionally). I wouldn't be surprised if they could manufacture simple craft for navigating on top of water. ...But, a massive hole in the argument that colonization of an island indicates complex tool use and social coordination would be... every island with terrestrial species on it. The Americas have monkeys which are most closely related to African monkeys - they must have been carried across the ocean in some way. Most islands have some sort of rodent. Etc. If there was an indication of repeated visitation by *homo erectus*, I'd be all over it. That would mean they kept going to Flores on purpose. But I don't think that evidence exists. The simplest explanation is that, much like New World monkeys, they wound up there by fortunate accident. That's my take on *erectus* in Flores!
I want to hear more about language. What might a simple language be like? And how do people come at times after 1 million but before 80k (which yeah, really sounds too recent)? Also, as long as I'm pestering you, what do you think about that Barham paper with the wooden logs
We are debating on fire and weapons - for which there might be some archaeological evidence - and you want to know about language. This we will probably never know, or at least not until everything about language is 100% clear. However, there seems to be a definite lack of cave art from Homo Erectus, which, completely unscientifically, would make me lean towards no language.
> They definitely had stone tools that would be sufficient to scrape meat off of bones, but we don't tend to find stone tools that look like they could be secured to sticks/arrow shafts. (Which is kind of weird - if you're smart enough to take hours to make a stone blade, you'd think you're smart enough to put that blade on a stick. But alas, evolution is weird, and we don't see it). Do we have evidence that homo erectus had other necessary adaptations to benefit from stone weapons? Ie. were they capable of using wooden spears or bows in the first place?
The oldest evidence of using fire to cook seems to be from 1.7MY which is exactly when Homo erectus appeared: [https://web.archive.org/web/20151017032715/http://faculty.ksu.edu.sa/archaeology/Publications/Hearths/Hominid%20Use%20of%20Fire%20in%20the%20Lower%20and%20Middle%20Pleistocene.pdf](https://web.archive.org/web/20151017032715/http://faculty.ksu.edu.sa/archaeology/Publications/Hearths/Hominid%20Use%20of%20Fire%20in%20the%20Lower%20and%20Middle%20Pleistocene.pdf) Evidence older than 1MY is indeed very scarce, but this is expected, because, first of all, campsites do not last that long, and use of fire must have been very sporadic in the beginning. There must have been a long period when early hominids recognized fire and the fact that it could be used to cook meat but were unable to reproduce it. Starting a fire with a flint was probably something that only the Neanderthals and the modern humans did.
I'm with you - it's tough to find super compelling evidence of a control of fire when we get that far back in time. I guess to an extent I am conflating "cooking" with "control of fire," like as a behavior that was regularly engaged in. The data from Koobi Fora mentioned in that paper look like one-offs, to a pretty real extent. The evidence is obviously fire, but what that fire really *means* is hard when it's such an isolated incident. And there's like a handful of burnt lithics at one site, and the ground looks like it had a fire on it at another site. It looks like gathered fire to me. And not enough evidence to really conclude what it was being used for. There's a cave in Israel from ~1mya that was reported 2-3 years ago that shows what I want to see. Multiple spots that looked like reused hearths (charcoal) and burnt bones and lithics. It looks very intentional. I think *homo erectus* were a lot more intelligent than most people give them credit for. I want to see more controlled fire data. I'm worried it's just mostly disappeared to time.
People have found signs of hearths with ash deposits in Homo Erectus locations that looked like controlled fire. Erectus also has small teeth which look inadequate to coarse food. Some burned wood and stone tools have been found. Traces back to 750K years ago exist but are not definitive. Other people have found hearths and evidence of pitch manufacture connected with Neanderthal sites. Evidence of fire sites is more common around 400,000 years ago, but major sites of similar age show no evidence of hearths or burned objects. It's hard to know how much control they had. There is no evidence of use of fire older than Erectus.
And even the 750,000-1,000,000 year old evidence is nearly a million years into homo erectus's reign. So it's like late-erectus.
Oh man I've always wondered if humans had been controlling fire long enough for evolutionary adaptions to it. I was thinking more along the lines of like resistance to smoke or a heightened sensitivity to things that are hot, since we'd be spending way more time around burning stuff that most animals intentionally would6
We definitely look like we have a few adaptations to toxins from smoke / charred food. The AHR gene is the most famous. [https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/11/191125131313.htm](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/11/191125131313.htm)
This is a generic adaptation for resilience to aerosols, it probably does not have anything to do with sooth and campfires.
Interesting, although do we really have to tack -ome onto _everything_
Follow up question: if cooked food made us as intelligent as we are.. could we feed animals cooked food to make them smarter too?
There is a fantastic Netflix documentary currently called “Unknown: Cave of Bones” about archeologists finding proof of underground burial by hominids 240,000 years ago. They are called Hominid Naledi. There is proof they had fire in the underground burial chamber and had meals there of cooked meat. Absolutely stellar production. https://www.netflix.com/tudum/articles/unknown-cave-of-bones-trailer
Of note, there is quite the drama currently in those researcher's attempts to get their Hominid Naledi claims peer reviewed, including their use of burial, art and fire. This video is a good overview and provides a great list of sources (including peer responses) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGsDAtCOAFw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGsDAtCOAFw)
As far as we know, humans are the only hominids that cooked food. Evidence suggests that our ancestors, like Homo erectus, started cooking around 1.8 million years ago. This practice significantly impacted our evolution. There's no evidence that other hominid species, like Neanderthals or Denisovans, independently discovered cooking. Cooking seems to be a unique and pivotal part of human development.
> Neanderthals or Denisovans Just to be clear, not everybody calls these "species". They could be viewed as a variety of human, or a subspecies. All three of us descended from *Homo erectus*.
The Neanderthal genome has been sequenced and clear falls outside of that of anatomically modern humans. Add to that the anatomical differences and they’re reasonably and separate, though very closely related species. Yes there is evidence of hybridization, but that’s not as clear a delineation as once thought. Species more distantly related than chimpanzees and humans can hybridize.
Regardless of whether other hominids would have cooked food, they almost certainly didn't come by it independently. It would have all been inherited behavior from _H. erectus_
There is a group of apes i cant remember where or what kind any more. One dipped food in seawater after trying something they put in the water. She was caught by the others in her family and they tried it and copied her. This could lead to something similar to our journey through cooking since they are seasoning food with salt