At ZME Science, science writer Mihai Andrei reports on a new study from Tel Aviv University that suggests that humans may have first used fire to smoke meat rather than to cook it:

The study’s authors, Dr. Ben-Dor and Prof. Ran Barkai, re-examined fire’s earliest appearances in archaeological sites. They focused not on charred seeds or hearths, but on what was lying next to them: the bones of enormous animals.

They looked at nine sites dating back between 1.9 and 0.8 million years, from Kenya to Israel and Spain. These sites had numerous differences, but one pattern stood out. “All contained large quantities of bones from large animals — mostly elephants, but also hippopotamuses, rhinoceroses, and others,” said Dr. Ben-Dor.

“Prehistoric Humans Lit Fires to Smoke Meat a Million Years Ago”,” June 4, 2025

Essentially, bringing down an elephant meant food for families for months but that food needed to be protected both from predators and from spoiling.

The study doesn’t deny that early humans eventually cooked with fire. In fact, there’s evidence that fish were roasted as early as 780,000 years ago at Gesher Benot Ya’aqov, one of the sites studied. But cooking was likely a secondary benefit — something that happened “at zero marginal energetic cost” once the fire was already burning to preserve food and keep predators at bay. “A Million Years Ago””

Andrei notes that this changes the picture of how we understand early humans:

If the hypothesis holds, it reshapes the timeline of human fire use. Rather than a gradual culinary adaptation, it becomes a strategic innovation, born from necessity. It also reframes early humans not as opportunistic foragers, but as organized, meat-focused communities capable of delayed gratification and long-term planning. “A Million Years Ago””

It’s becoming clear that, as Michael Egnor and I say in The Immortal Mind: (Worthy, June 3, 2025), the human mind has no history. We see it in the past when and where we see it.

The paper is open access.