Food is the staff of life. In our modern world, cooked food is commonplace. But how did our ancient ancestors go from eating raw plants and carcasses to broiled burgers? This development of cooking was an important transition, but it’s also poorly understood. Scholars suggest that a reliance on cooking drove human evolution. This theory requires our hominin ancestors to be cooking almost 1.8 million years ago. Unfortunately, we lack archeological evidence of cooking until around 780,00 years ago at the Gesher Benot Ya’aqov site. For this project, I reexamined the stone tool assemblage to attempt to discern the tools our ancestors likely used for cooking. I then tested an ancient cooking device – a flat rock grill – to discern what artifacts, and what damages, could have appeared in the archeological record. Findings from this study could open a gateway for reexamining prehistoric sites for missed evidence of cooking.
