How did early humans start to cook their food by roasting it in the fire?
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Answer:
Fire provided a source of warmth and lighting, protection from predators (especially at night), a way to create more advanced hunting tools, and a method for cooking food. These cultural advances allowed human geographic dispersal, cultural innovations, and changes to diet and behavior.
Explanation:
Cooking had profound evolutionary effect because it increased food efficiency, which allowed human ancestors to spend less time foraging, chewing, and digesting.
Answer:
Clearly, the controlled use of fire to cook food was an extremely important element in the biological and social evolution of early humans, whether it started 400,000 or 2 million years ago. The lack of physical evidence suggests early humans did little to modify the control and use of fire for cooking for hundreds of thousands of years, which is quite surprising, given that they developed fairly elaborate tools for hunting during this time, as well as creating some of the first examples of cave art about 64,000 years ago. Physical evidence shows that cooking food on hot stones may have been the only adaptation during the earliest phases of cooking.
Then, about 30,000 years ago, “earth ovens” were developed in central Europe. These were large pits dug in the ground and lined with stones. The pits were filled with hot coals and ashes to heat the stones; food, presumably wrapped in leaves, was placed on top of the ashes; everything was covered with earth; and the food was allowed to roast very slowly. The bones of many types of animals, including large mammoths, have been found in and around ancient earth ovens. This was clearly an improvement over rapidly roasting meat by fire, as slow cooking gives time for the collagen in tough connective tissue to break down to gelatin; this process takes at least several hours, and often much longer, depending on the age of the animal and where the meat comes from in the animal. The shoulders and hindquarters of animals are involved in more muscular action and thus contain more connective tissue than the tenderloin near the ribs. Breaking down tough connective tissue makes the meat easier to chew and digest. Like today’s barbecue methods, cooking meat slowly in earth ovens made it very tender and flavorful.
After dry roasting with fire and heating on hot stones, the next true advance in very early cooking technology appears to have been the development of wet cooking, in which food is boiled in water. Boiling food would certainly be an advantage when cooking starchy root tubers and rendering fat from meat. Many archeologists believe the smaller earth ovens lined with hot stones were used to boil water in the pit for cooking meat or root vegetables as early as 30,000 years ago (during the Upper Paleolithic period). Others believe it is likely that water was first boiled for cooking in perishable containers, either over the fire or directly on hot ashes or stones, well before this time.
Unfortunately, no direct archeological evidence has survived to support this conclusion. Yet we know that even a flammable container can be heated above an open flame as long as there is liquid in the container to remove the heat as the liquid evaporates. Thus containers made of bark or wood or animal hides could have been used for boiling food well before the Upper Paleolithic period. No physical evidence of sophisticated utensils for cooking food appears until about 20,000 years ago, when the first pieces of fired clay pottery appear. Using sensitive chemical methods, scientists have determined that shards of pottery found in Japan contain fatty acids from marine sources such as fish and shellfish. These heat-resistant pots may have been used to boil seafood.
Explanation: