Fish supper may have been humans’ first cooked meal

THE first ever hot dinner may have been a six-foot carp that was cooked 780,000 years ago in what is now Israel.

Academics now believe that cooked fish was a dietary staple for huntergatherers in the region for millennia.

Experts say the fish was “tasty and nutritious”, easy to catch year-round and part of a varied diet.

Archaeologists found charred carp teeth scattered around the Gesher Benot Ya’akov site near Hula Lake on the Jordan river.

Analysis found the teeth remains to be almost 800,000 years’ old and that they had not simply been put on a fire. The fish were cooked on a low heat, the scientists believe, and there was possibly “some kind of earth oven that maintained a temperature below 50C”.

Dr Jens Najorka, the study’s author from the Natural History Museum, said: “Given lack of evidence of exposure to high temperatures, it is clear that the fish were not cooked directly in fire, and were not thrown into a fire as waste or as material for burning.

“The skill to cook marks an evolutionary advance, as it provided an additional means for making optimal use of available food resources,” said the site director, Prof Naama Goren-inbar from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

“It is even possible that cooking was not limited to fish, but included various types of animals and plants.”

The researchers say cooking probably allowed early humans to get more nutrition from their food and to evolve and become more intelligent.

“This is the earliest evidence of cooking by hominins,” the scientists write in journal.