Early humans may have cooked fish in ovens 780,000 years ago

The person is Christa Lesté-Lasserre.

Humans may have been cooking fish in an oven at least 780,000 years ago, based on the changes in the fish teeth.

The Steinhardt Museum of Natural History in Tel Aviv, Israel, says that the earliest evidence of cooking can be found in the findings.

She says that they have developed a method that allows them to cook in relatively low temperatures. If you show that the food has been cooked, you can show that the control of fire is related to cooking.

The discovery of animal charred remains led to the idea that humans were cooking meat 1.5 million years ago. That doesn't mean people were cooking before eating.

She doesn't think charred material means cooking. Food was thrown into the fire.

A group of people studied a 780,000-year-old settlement in Israel. The inhabitants are most likely to have been Homo erectus because of the age and stone tools at the site.

There were clumps of fish teeth, but no bones, around the area where the fire once raged. The teeth of most of the fish were from the Jordan himri and the Jordan barbel. They wondered if the fish had been cooked at low heat, which would make the bones softer and cause them to break.

In order to test their idea, Zohar and her team adapted a technique from human forensic investigations in which X-ray diffraction reveals the sizes of crystals in tooth enamel.

The crystal sizes in the tooth enamel were examined after the researchers cooked and burned black carp at different temperatures. Crystal sizes in three fossilised teeth from Jordan barbel, which had probably never been exposed to high heat, were looked at.

The 30 fish teeth collected by Zohar and her colleagues were compared with the previously tested teeth to see how their structures compare.

The fish teeth from the human settlement were exposed to temperatures of 200C to 500C, but hadn't been exposed to the fire. There were no fish bones nearby and the teeth were found near a fire source, suggesting that the fish may have been cooked whole.

She says that the results show that humans weren't just eating fish raw and throwing the heads into the fire, they were exposed to a lot higher temperatures.

Each of the parameters fits together like a puzzle so that we can say that it is related to cooking.

It's safer to eat fish when it's cooked. Evidence of their advanced cognitive abilities was provided by the fact that these populations were cooking their fish and eating it. It makes sense that they would use it for cooking if they already know how to control fire.

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