Posted on 06/14/2025 7:35:22 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Long before the days of electricity and fridge freezers, meat was preserved by smoke. A new study suggests the practice could stretch back almost 2 million years, and may even be a primary reason our ancestors started making fires in the first place.
While the generation of flames is inextricably linked with the rise of humans, in the earliest days it would've required significant time and effort to ignite and keep fires lit. The benefits of preserving meat may have been a key reason why that time and effort was worth it.
The study is the work of two researchers from Tel Aviv University in Israel, and follows their previous studies linking human evolution to the hunting of large animals and the shrinking size of those animals over time.
Burnt bones Some of the burnt bones analyzed in the study. (Tel Aviv University) Nine different historical sites across South Africa, Kenya, Israel, Ethiopia, and Spain were analyzed for the study. The researchers looked at the sizes of the animal remains found at the locations and their estimated age, with some of the bones thought to be almost 2 million years old.
"The process of gathering fuel, igniting a fire, and maintaining it over time required significant effort, and they needed a compelling, energy-efficient motive to do so," says paleoanthropologist Miki Ben-Dor.
"We have proposed a new hypothesis regarding that motive."
The researchers note that wherever fire was found at these sites, so were large animal remains – not just plants and small prey. What's more, they calculated the energy gains from cooking and eating this big game meat straight away, compared with preserving it.
Combining these factors provides strong evidence that these fires weren't lit just for warmth or to cook the large animals straight away, the researchers argue. The energy needed to keep a fire going would have outweighed the energy from a meal or two of cooked meat.
Researcher Ran Barkai with part of an elephant bone Researcher Ran Barkai with part of an elephant bone. (Tel Aviv University) Not only could the flames have smoked and dried more of the meat so it could last longer, they would also keep away other scavengers eager to feast on the food the early humans had caught – such as a hippo or a rhino.
"For early humans, fire use was not a given, and at most archaeological sites dated earlier than 400,000 years ago, there is no evidence of the use of fire," says Ben-Dor. "Nevertheless, at several early sites, there are clear signs that fire was used, but without burnt bones or evidence of meat roasting."
"We understand that early humans at that time – mostly Homo erectus – did not use fire regularly, but only occasionally, in specific places and for special purposes."
An ancient elephant, for example, could keep a couple dozen people fed for up to 3 months, the researchers calculated. Those millions of calories are worth preserving, a return on the investment of going out to hunt.
"In this study, we propose a new understanding of the factors that motivated early humans to begin using fire," says archaeologist Ran Barkai.
"It is likely that once the fire was produced for these purposes, it was also occasionally used for cooking – at zero marginal energetic cost."
The research has been published in Frontiers in Nutrition.
And yet, Texans still don’t get it that their wonderful smoked beef is not BBQ. It’s smoked beef. BBQ is a type of meat.
At least the meat they smoked didn’t give them lung cancer.
“At least the meat they smoked didn’t give them lung cancer.”
Since the average lifespan back then was 35-40 years, I doubt that was an issue.
“That’s quite the trick since humans (homo sapiens) have only existed 300,000 years.”
Humans include all of the Homo genus... Homo habilis, Homo.erectus, Homo.sapiens.neanderthalensis,We are Homo.Sapien.Sapiens
The first two go back 2.4 and 2 million years.
People from the northern Iberian Peninsula have up to 4% specifically the Basque people who also have very rare RH negative blood too. This is why Homo.Sapien is split into three sub species who all could and did interbreed. Farther back Homo.sapiens.neanderthalensis were known also with modern DNA analysis to interbreed with Homo.erectus this leads to a continuous DNA line for all modern humans back at least 2 million years.
Humans smoked meat for 2 million years? You know how hard it is to keep that stuff lit?
No barbeque is from the native Caribbean people’s language that the Spanish in the 1500s pronounced it as barbacoa which the world literally means a cooking method of slow cooling meat over a pit of burning wood coals. That is literally what barbacoa is and how it is still done in the whole of Latin America and also the Southern USA. Instead of pits dug in the ground the enslaved Afro-Caribbean’s created above ground smoke pits some historical images show in ground trenches and pits still in use all the way into the 1800s.
Barbeque from barbacoa is a cooking method not a type or cut of meat that’s just historical fact played out over a three hundred plus year period. Thousands of years in the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean and Latin America.
My father was a judge on the BBQ circuit for a number of years. We all learned the very detailed history of how American BBQ came to be from the afro-Caribbean’s barbacoa. Europeans adapted the cooking methods to different proteins of what they had available. In the American South you can still find barbacoa pits in use cooking game meats like raccoon, opossum, wild turkeys, wild boar just to name a few. For sale in the deep deep South always run by a multi generational black family who’s ancestors are afro Caribbean’s. The Gullah people of South Carolina are another perfect example who have a 300+ year history of barbacoa cooking methods they brought with them from the origins of that word and cooking method.
I love me some smoked possum and greens. Cue Granny from the hills.
You beat me to it. You can't keep banana peels lit either. Or so I've, uh, been told...
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