March 29, 2024

Researchers find historical sense: People were already cooking 780,000 years ago |  life and knowledge

Researchers find historical sense: People were already cooking 780,000 years ago | life and knowledge

Researchers find historical buzz |

Food was already being cooked 780,000 years ago

An exciting discovery during excavations in northern Israel!

An international research team led by Dr. Irit Zohar of Tel Aviv University discovered traces of the oldest cooked meal – a meal prepared some 780,000 years ago. Meaning: people were already cooking at the beginning of the Paleolithic era!

According to the researchers, the freshwater fish was boiled, and the analysis of the fish’s teeth was able to prove this. Ancient gold coins were found in the Jordan Valley, more precisely at the excavation site of Gesher Benu Ya’akov.

This illustration shows how researchers can imagine the cooking process hundreds of thousands of years ago

Photo: Tel Aviv University

Traces have already been discovered there in the past proving the controlled use of fire nearly 800,000 years ago – before anywhere else outside Africa. In addition, traces were found in the area earlier proving that the hunters who lived there used tools to split the meat of the animals they killed.

This is how fish is proven to be cooked

During the excavations, the researchers found large amounts of the fish’s teeth — but no bones or skeletal remains. This made the scientists stand up and take notice. Because experiments have shown that the bones of existing fish species dissolve when cooked, but the teeth do not. In addition, the structure of tooth enamel changes as a result of the cooking process – it is precisely this change that was found in fish teeth.

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According to Mainz paleontologist Thomas Totken, these findings showed that humans living in what is now the Jordan Valley may have eaten freshwater fish all year round.

The discovery is impressive: the transition to cooked food is a crucial step in human evolution. However, the finds also raise new questions: it is not yet known what kind of people lived in this area 780,000 years ago. And what cooking utensils they used is also unknown.

The results of the study have been published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.