Length of time humans had fire before cooking?

Is it known how long humans (or whatever predecessor) had fire for before they started cooking food? Presumably cooking first was applied to meat, any clues as to when boiling first happened? I suppose you’d need well-made pots first?

I’ve read, sorry no cite, that some cultures made baskets tight enough to hold water. They would then heat rocks in a fire and drop them in the water filled basket. Perhaps this is a prehistoric urban legend?

Several nomadic cultures would use animals stomachs as pots - as long they weren’t allowed to boil dry it would work. There’s also heating rocks really hot then placing them in a container of water to boil water.

H. sapiens has probably always had some sort of cooking technology. So most likely did H. neanderthal. H. erectus is believed to have had fire, whether they cooked or not is debatable but there’s a good chance it goes back that far, nearly 2 million years on at least a crude/casual basis.

There is some evidence that cooking goes back at least a million years. As mentioned upthread, you can make very tightly woven waterproof baskets and drop hot rocks into them.

In some ways, cooking vegetables is more important than meat because it releases nutrients that are not available in the uncooked form, while I think we can digest raw meat quite well.

See Richard Wrangham’s book Catching Fire: Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human - Wikipedia for some more detail. He wrote the book before the evidence for a million year old cooking came to light. Basically, his theme is that cooking gave us the added calories needed to set off the evolution of the brain. The brain uses about 25% of the resting metabolism.

Fire did not immediately spread to all peoples as soon as it was discovered. Each of hundreds of different cultures, all isolated from each other, developed their use of fire, along with the technology for all its practical uses, independently of each other, at widely different times in the human chronology. There is no simple answer that reflects a time-line of the human use of any pre-historic attribute.

I’ve read reports from early colonials that they found tribes living near the sea in modern times, who did not have fish in their diet, because they had never discovered now to get fish out of the sea. You can’t simply assume that the moment man discovered something, that every culture had immediate access to the technology.

Roasting’s easier than boiling - all you need to do is leave a carcass too close to the fire and then discover next morning that while it’s badly scorched you’re too hungry to just throw it away, and off you go. For that matter, discovering a partly-burnt but edible animal corpse could well predate taming fire.

You can also cook stuff by digging a pit, burning a big fire, tossing in a carcass as the fire dies down and then filling in the loose earth to keep the heat in overnight. AIUI from a book called Living Off The Land this is a traditional Australian aboriginal method. Then there’s balling up a large bird in clay and tossing the clay ball on the fire, then breaking up the clay ball when the fire burns out and the ball has cooked enough to handle, which will give you a nicely cooked and de-feathered corpse. No need to wait for pottery in any of these cases.

I doubt this is knowable with any precision. My guess is that in the case of roasting meat, the answer is “about 20 minutes”. If you have raw meat near a fire, the ease and value of cooking becomes obvious.

As noted, all you need is a hole scraped in the ground, lined with something like an animal’s stomach - and some hot rocks.

Look what Zog do!

Another popular technique is to wrap the victim (carcass, veggies) in big leaves - or something similar indedible to absorb the scorch marks and leave the real meal edible, easily peeled. Beats chewing on clay.

Speculation on my part - I would guess that cooked meat was discovered thru scavenging following a brush-fire, possibly caused by lightning, that trapped, killed, and partially/fully cooked a few animals. I could imagine the benefits of cooked meat perhaps lead early people to want to capture and control fire.

If we are talking about domesticated fire, then I would think that cooking occurred minutes to years before. Forage through the remains of a wild fire, find an animal that died in it. Eat. Tasty. Eventually figure out how to create fire at will, add your own animal.

Boiling too. Wild fire, find cooked fish/amphibian/bug simmering in a shallow pond or puddle that is still very warm. Instant soup.

It’s no surprise that a hunting based tribe would eschew fishing, since being near the sea impacts little on hunting. Now a tribe used to fishing who move closer inland…well…

Of course, the native Hawaiians did boil water using hot stones ipus[gourds] and umekes[wooden bowls].

It’s hard to answer this question, because we don’t even know when humans started using fires regularly. The answer is in the 250 KYA to 2 MYA range. That is, there’s pretty clear cut archeological evidence of humans using fires regularly 250KYA. (IIRC, there might be more recent evidence that sets that date back a bit, but I can’t recall it.) It’s considered very unlikely that ancestors of humans 2 MYA ago would have been users of fire, based on brain size and similar considerations. Sorry, I don’t have a cite.

I don’t know about evidence of first cooking. Most cooking tools would be wooden and therefore unlikely to be preserved, but cooking makes changes to bones that I bet we’d be able to detect.

It’s conjectured (and seems reasonable to me) that one of the reasons we’re not hairy is that we used fire. Fire and hairy bodies don’t go that well together. Archaeologists also point out that cooking increases the types of foods we can eat. Many plants aren’t edible unless boiled or roasted. The fire provides a sort of external digestion. A hearty debate is whether the use of fire allowed growing bigger brains, or whether bigger brains were required to harness fire. As usual, the answer is probably a “both”. That is, some minimum level of intelligence is required, but once gained, the ability could have allowed further expansion.

If the tribes referred to were the Aboriginal Tasmanians there is now archaeological evidence that a long time ago they did, in fact, know how to fish based on things like hooks. At some point they lost the technology, it’s not that they never had it.

A possible reason for that is periodic blooms of microscopic ocean life that are either directly toxic to fish, or allow toxins to build up in fish to the point they become toxic to people. Apparently the seas around Tasmania suffer from this a bit more often than other places on the planet. If the hypothetical tribe has no reliable way to distinguish toxic from non-toxic fish then eating fish becomes roulette and abandoning seafood starts to make a lot of sense, particularly if there is sufficient land-based food to keep everyone fed.

There is also a hypothesis that some catastrophe killed off a large number of Tasmanians in the past, enough that survival was extremely precarious for awhile even by hunter-gatherer standards and some cultural knowledge was lost, resulting in a technological bottleneck and the most primitive material culture known in historical times. Being isolated from the rest of the world, they could not benefit from outsiders re-teaching them certain techniques.

The Tasmanians had also lost the knowledge of how to make fire - they certainly used it, but were utterly dependent on either keeping the tribe’s fire going, finding a natural source of fire, or obtaining fires from their neighbors if the group’s fire went out.

So, yes, just because one group invents something doesn’t mean everyone else invents it, but clearly having contact with others helps spread such things. It seems trade routes are as human a thing as language or clothing fashions, and what’s known to one group is going to spread to their neighbors and then those neighbor’s neighbors, and so on until everyone within reach has the notion. While this might take a few generations it doesn’t take infinitely long. Given the “lifespans” of human species, even if H. neanderthal only had one genius come up with cooking or how to make fire it’s likely that such a thing spread among the species such that it winds up a widespread part of the hominid “toolkit” even if it’s not universal.

Then there’s the fact that some things really do seem to be invented more than once. It looks like writing was invented at least three times independently (Middle East, China, Central America), for example, and agriculture in multiple places as well. It is plausible that cooking was likewise multiply invented.

Given that fire occurs naturally all over the world it would be a little strange if hominds, even isolated ones, didn’t harness it for their own purposes. I don’t think we have any idea how often making fire at will was invented, it may have come about so long ago we’ll never know. Hominids have been using fire long before H. sapiens evolved. Did H. erectus know how to make fire, or just use found fire? Short of a time machine I doubt we’ll ever know, but it’s *possible *that some of them knew how to make fire on demand. We don’t know if they actually cooked or just used fire to stay warm or whatever, but if they had fire they could cook. Not having metal or ceramic pots, though, finding evidence of that will be a bit difficult.

Interesting, thanks!

Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs, and Steel” covers the agriculture example, and IIRC sets the number at between 6 and 10 different places. No doubt I’ll get this wrong, but the list includes:
Fertile Crescent
China and/or India
two places in Africa
Mesoamerica
South America
New Guinea
Australia

Cooking goes back far far longer than ag, though. The most isolated of these regions was separated about 40KYA, and I’d be very surprised to find that cooking wasn’t well-established long before then. But as you mentioned, technologies can be lost and then reinvented. Those cases can be much harder to tease out of the archaeological record.

GG&S also talks about Aboriginals forgetting how to fish. I think they were Torres Strait Islanders rather than Tasmanians though.

Seems weak.

Humans with artificially hairy bodies (aka clothing) often sit around fires. How often does one actually catch fire, to the extent that he/she would be removed from the gene pool?

Probably too obvious to be classified as “invented”. How often was walking invented? Or picking up a rock/stick, for use as a primitive weapon?

There’s the theory that as human ancestors dropped out of the trees and started foraging the plains around the forest, they also started scavenging the abandon carcasses of big game. Thus, they developed a digestive system for aged, softened meat; cooking simulates this breakdown rather well, so they simultaneously found soft meat and cooking, adding a good source of protein to their diet. They then went on to learn to hunt and kill their own meals.

The interesting question to me - humans developed agriculture, somewhere around 10,000 years ago in several locations suited for it. The migrants to North America came from Siberia and that general area about 14,000-plus years ago, and presumably took quite a few generations to get out of the ice fields and find areas conducive to agriculture. they apparently came from a nomadic culture, probably no exposure to or tradition of agriculture. So a bunch of random hunter-gatherers developed agriculture fairly quickly once they found the right location. However the earlier humans -say 20,000 or 50,000 years ago - lived in ideal conditions across Africa and Eurasia for 40,000 to 60,000 years, and still only developed agriculture 10,000 or so years ago. Why?