New Scientist
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Did cooking make us human? New evidence from Kenya suggests early hominins were roasting meat over fires 1.5 million years ago. The discovery pushes back evidence of fire use by hundreds of thousands of years, and lends weight to the idea that cooked food helped trigger the evolution of big-brained humans.
“It’s very exciting,” says Sarah Hlubik at Rutgers University in New Jersey. “This is the oldest site to date with evidence of human ancestors using fire.”
Hlubik and her colleagues found the evidence at a site in Kenya’s Koobi Fora region, which has a rich archaeological record. Parts of the site were first excavated in the 1970s and at the time researchers noticed unusual patches of reddened dirt. They were argued to indicate where ancient controlled fires had thermally altered the ground beneath. Read more on newscientist.com…
