It has been posited that the extra nutrition that led to the amazing evolution of the human brain came from cooked food, and therefore we owe it all to our ancient ancestors who learned to harness fire. But recent discoveries from Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania lead us to wonder about that theory.

...Olduvai Gorge wasn’t always so dry and dusty—and in fact, it once had something in common with the hot springs of Yellowstone National Park. Recently, a surprise discovery by an interdisciplinary team of archaeologists, geologists, and geochemists suggested that this cradle of our species was filled with soupy, steamy geothermal pools. According to the team, the hot springs might even have been ripe for old-fashioned culinary experimentation by our distant hominin ancestors.



“The major finding is that we contemplate a new resource for humans to process food,” says Ainara Sistiaga, a geoarchaeologist and geochemist at the University of Copenhagen, and the lead author of a recent paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “The paper opens a window to stop focusing on there being fire or there not being fire, to say there are other ways to cook and we should be looking for them.”

The hot springs were there along with hominims 1.7 million years ago. What if the first cooked food was boiled instead of roasted over a fire? That could completely divorce the use of fire from the initial growth spurt of human brains- like throwing hot water on the spark of humanity. Read what we've found so far at Atlas Obscura.



(Image credit: Noel Feans)