A team of scientists has pushed back the evidence of the first cooking of food by 610,000 years thanks to fish teeth found in Israel.
Anyone who wields a fishing rod will tell you that few meals are as satisfying as a good shore lunch. After getting up at dawn to tease the trout, resting near a crackling and warming fire, savoring the subtly grilled flesh of your catch, opens up a timeless space.
This very special pleasure may have been anchored in our imagination for longer than we thought. A multidisciplinary team of researchers from Israel, England and Germany has found traces of cooking of food dating back 780,000 years at the site of Gesher Benot Ya’aqov in Israel. We also know that this site, excavated since the 1930s, was probably occupied by Standing man − tools and tools were discovered there traces of hearths. This dramatically pushes back the beginnings of “cooking”, since the previous confirmation of the cooking of a food was “only” 170,000 years old.
Knowing when hominins cooked their food is important because cooked food is easier to chew, more digestible and safer. The energy saving linked to the cooking of food would thus have oriented the evolution of the genre Homo.
Talking teeth
There was little doubt that the act of cooking food dates back more than 170,000 years, but scientists have so far only had circumstantial evidence such as traces of controlled fires (which may be useful for more than cooking) or burnt bones (which may simply have been thrown into the flames).
It is thanks to the pharyngeal teeth – kinds of plates located in the throat – of fish related to the carp family that the team was able to demonstrate that the animals to which they had belonged were indeed cooked. As the site is adjacent to a lake, the researchers found fish remains in several places. Most had bones of all types and sizes of fish, suggesting a natural death. “But in another location, we can clearly see that there was a selection, with a preference for these large ‘carps'”, explains Marion Prévost, researcher at the Institute of Archeology of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. An area containing mostly teeth (and no bones) alerted the researchers: once cooked, the bones disintegrate more easily, but the stronger teeth might have resisted.
In this quadrilateral, the researchers noticed that the pharyngeal teeth also had a particular color. The team therefore wanted to study the crystals forming the enamel of these teeth which, under heat, expand. “We were looking to establish two things,” says Irit Zohar, researcher at the Steinhardt Museum of Natural History (linked to Tel Aviv University) and lead author of the article, published in the revue Nature Ecology and Evolution. First, what happens to the enamel crystals over time: do they grow naturally or not? Then, if there are any changes due to heating them, but not burning them. Because when the teeth have been burned, it’s very easy to see it. »
Thanks to an innovative method taking advantage of X-ray diffraction, the team was able to see the effect of heat on the pharyngeal teeth of contemporary carp and compare them with what had happened to the teeth of ancient fish. The experiment enabled him to conclude that the temperatures to which the various prehistoric teeth had been subjected oscillated between 200 and 500 degrees Celsius, which is consistent with a cooking temperature. These teeth showed no burn marks, eliminating the possibility that they had simply been thrown into the fire.
“It’s a very good demonstration, says Julien Riel-Salvatore, professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Montreal, who did not participate in this study. There is really an almost perfect convergence of the indications attesting that we are in the presence of something controlled which aimed to heat up to a certain point the flesh of these fish. The team’s conclusion strikes me as entirely believable. »
For Marion Prévost, the use of this investigative technique is promising. “It’s a methodology that provides direct evidence of cooking,” she says. Also, these fish teeth will now have a particular interest; a small amount of such remains might reveal many secrets.
Fish probably played a vital role in the genus’ past Homo. But as their remains do not support the passage of time well, they have not managed to make their place in our imagination of prehistory. However, the exploitation of fish must have had a very great importance for the first humans, according to Irit Zohar. In her article, she points to the fact that many major archaeological sites are located in places where there were water sources. “It would be a little strange to think that our ancestors used all the resources at their disposal, but not the fish,” she notes. Some specialists believe that the fish have probably been exploited for a very long time, possibly for more than a million years. And it’s not a fishing story!
