Oldest evidence of the controlled use of fire to cook food
The remains of a huge carp fish (2 meters/6.5 feet long), analyzed by the Hebrew University, Bar-Ilan University Tel Aviv University, in collaboration with Oranim Academic College, the Israel Oceanographic and Limnological Research institution, the Natural History Museum in London, and the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, mark the earliest signs of cooking by prehistoric human to 780,000 years ago, predating the available data by some 600,000 years.
A close analysis of the remains of a carp-like fish found at the Gesher Benot Ya'aqov (GBY) archaeological site in Israel shows that the fish were cooked roughly 780,000 years ago. Cooking is defined as the ability to process food by controlling the temperature at which it is heated and includes a wide range of methods. Read more.
Holy SHIT this is cool!! Y'all! Y'ALL!! This is HUGE!! Our ancestors were having a nice grill out 600,000 years EARLIER than we thought!!! We went from thinking this was 180,000 years ago to fucking 780,000 years ago!! That’s mind-blowing!!! Like… just think about the difference between starting a 180k fic (already a sizable investment) vs getting into a 780k MONSTER!! And… that’s just words! Not years!! I’m blown away!!
ETA2: See also this press release on the discovery.
ETA3: And here’s the link to the paper at Nature. (Sorry, friends, it’s a paywalled article.) :/
(I’m going hunting for the original paper, now. Because I want to know what species that carp was. After all… until you know the species, you can’t come up with a decent recipe…)
Per this: they mention two likely species (without specifically correlating them to the teeth they were analyzing in this study) as Luciobarbus longiceps, known casually as the Jordan barbel, and Carasobarbus canis, the Jordan himri. While both these fish are members of the Cyprinidae family, which includes carp, they’re not all that carpish. (And the genus name of Luciobarbus suggests that it’s a bit more pike-shaped; Esox lucius is the true [northern] pike.)
…Anyway, barbel are a bit more like perch, if you ask me. …But in any case, both are firm-fleshed fish that would probably bake up nicely. (Some people online can be found muttering about a slightly earthy flavor to the fish, which can sometimes have to do with the quality of the water where they’re found… and as a result, most of the recipes I turned up in a quick search involve simmering them in flavored stocks of one kind or another: like this one via the old Foody site, now only available at the Wayback Machine – one of Mrs. Beeton’s recipes. Or search for “barbel” in this page from the Illustrated London Cookery Book.)
