Fire and the First Cooks.
Fourteen thousand four hundred years ago, people in what is now Jordan ground wild wheat and tubers and baked flatbread on a hearth — four thousand years before anyone farmed.
The physical evidence is patchy, because fire leaves fragile traces. At Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa, burnt bone and plant ash point to fire in use about one million years ago; at Gesher Benot Ya'aqov in Israel, hearths and the chemistry of fish teeth suggest fish were cooked about 780 000 years ago; by about 400 000 years ago, hearths are common in the Levant and Europe. The primatologist Richard Wrangham argues that cooking began much earlier, with Homo erectus nearly two million years ago, and drove our evolution: cooked food yields more energy (I.1), allowing smaller guts and larger brains. Others think the timing is not yet shown. Both sides agree that cooking made food safer, softer and more nourishing.
Later steps are better dated. Pottery for boiling and stewing appears first in East Asia — at Xianrendong Cave in China about 20 000 years ago — long before farming. At Shubayqa in Jordan, charred crumbs of flatbread made from wild cereals and club-rush tubers date to 14 400 years ago (XXVI.5). Farming began about 11 500 years ago in the Fertile Crescent and soon after in China (millet, rice), Mesoamerica (maize, squash) and elsewhere; at Jiahu in China, residues of a fermented drink of rice, honey and fruit date to about 7000 BCE (XIV.1). Cooking, in short, is one of the oldest human technologies. The workshop sets out the timeline.
Below: a timeline of the earliest evidence for cooking, from controlled fire to bread and fermented drinks, on a logarithmic scale of years ago, the step you choose highlighted, with what is known and what is argued.
- Describe the evidence for early cooking.
- Distinguish what is known from what is argued.
- Place pottery, bread and fermentation in time.
- Explain why cooking mattered for humans.
Known, and argued
The timeline is drawn on a logarithmic scale because the gaps are so uneven: a million years from the first fire to the cooked fish, then hundreds of thousands to common hearths, then a crowding of firsts in the last twenty thousand years — pots, bread, farming, fermentation — as people settled and their populations grew. The most ambitious idea, that cooking itself made us human, fits the anatomy — our small teeth, jaws and guts suit soft, energy-dense food — but the direct evidence of fire that early has not been found.
What the history teaches a cook is that every basic technique in this course is ancient: roasting over embers (II.4), boiling in a pot (III.2), baking flat dough on a hot stone (XXVI.5), fermenting grain and fruit (XIV). What is new is the understanding — why they work, and how to make them reliable and safe — which is what the rest of this volume asks you to show.
Cook something the oldest way available to you — a flatbread on a dry pan or stone, or a vegetable roasted in the embers of a barbecue — and notice how much skill it takes without dials.
Terms
- Controlled fire
- Fire made or kept by people, not wildfire.
- Cooking hypothesis
- The argued idea that cooking drove human evolution.
- Natufian
- A culture of the Levant, about 15 000–11 500 years ago.
- Pottery
- Fired clay vessels, first for boiling and storing.
Sources
- R. Wrangham, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, 2009 (the cooking hypothesis, argued); F. Berna et al., PNAS 109 (2012) E1215–E1220: burnt bone and plant ash at Wonderwerk Cave about one million years ago; I. Zohar et al., Nature Ecology & Evolution 6 (2022) 2016–2028: fish cooked at Gesher Benot Ya'aqov about 780 000 years ago; X. Wu et al., Science 336 (2012) 1696–1700: pottery at Xianrendong Cave, China, about 20 000 years old; A. Arranz-Otaegui et al., PNAS 115 (2018) 7925–7930: flatbread at Shubayqa 1, Jordan, about 14 400 years old; P. E. McGovern et al., PNAS 101 (2004) 17593–17598: a fermented drink of rice, honey and fruit at Jiahu, China, about 7000 BCE.