New Theory Suggests Meat Preservation, Not Cooking, Drove Early Fire Use

Hundreds of thousands—if not over a million—years ago, humans discovered how to make fire. This would prove to be one of the most important advancements in prehistoric human development, but the origin of this vital discovery remains a contentious topic among scholars.

In a study published last month in the journal Frontiers, researchers from Tel Aviv University proposed a new theory for what prompted humans to start making and controlling fires: to protect their food from animals, and, most notably, to extend the prehistoric shelf life of their meat through smoking and drying. In other words, prehistoric speck. The scientists claim to be the first to propose this hypothesis, which aligns with a broader theory they’ve been developing: that humans’ consumption of large animals—and then smaller ones when the megafauna became extinct—drove important prehistoric developments.

“The origins of fire use is a ‘burning’ topic among prehistory researchers around the world. It is generally agreed that by 400,000 years ago, fire use was common in domestic contexts—most likely for roasting meat, and perhaps also for lighting and heating,” co-author Ran Barkai explained in a statement. “However there is controversy regarding the preceding million years, and various hypotheses have been put forward to explain why early humans began using fire. In this study, we sought to explore a new perspective on the issue.”

Before around 400,000 years ago, early humans such as Homo erectus used fire only occasionally, “in specific places and for special purposes,” co-author Miki Ben-Dor explained. Starting and maintaining a fire was an arduous process that required a “compelling, energy-efficient motive.”

To investigate this motive, Barkai and Ben-Dor studied previous research on all known prehistoric sites with evidence of fire use from between 1.8 million and 800,000 years ago, amounting to nine locations. Their analysis revealed that all nine sites featured an abundance of large animal remains, including elephants, hippopotamuses, and rhinoceroses.

“From previous studies, we know that these animals were extremely important to early human diets and provided most of the necessary calories. The meat and fat of a single elephant, for example, contain millions of calories, enough to feed a group of 20–30 people for a month or more,” Ben-Dor said. A successfully hunted elephant or hippopotamus was “a kind of meat and fat ‘bank’ that needed to be protected and preserved for many days since it was coveted not only by predators but also by bacteria.”

The researchers’ analysis of the nine prehistoric sites, combined with their calculations of the potential “energetic advantage” of preserving large game and observations of modern hunter-gatherer societies, culminated in the idea that humans were motivated to make fire to both protect their meat “banks” from other animals and to smoke and dry them for long-term preservation. Once humans adopted fire to serve these means, they may have also used it for cooking “at zero marginal energetic cost,” Barkai added. In other words, fire was initially used to smoke and dry meat, and only later repurposed for cooking.

The researchers say their approach backs a bigger theory they’ve been developing—one that sees major prehistoric changes as reactions to shifts in diet. Early on, that meant hunting big animals, but as those species dwindled, people started relying more on smaller game for food.

While we already knew that ancient humans, including the iconic Ötzi the Iceman and ancient Native Americans in southwest Florida, were curing and smoking meats thousands of years ago, the researchers’ new theory predates this approach by hundreds of thousands of years, and contextualizes it within one of the most important prehistoric human developments known to science.