Smoking is a traditional practice to make meat durable. New analyzes of prehistoric fireplaces and animal bones now suggest that early people smoked meat in the Stone Age at least 1.8 million years ago to preserve it. At that time, the Homo erectus menu included smoked elephant and hippo, which a group of people could eat for a whole month. The smoked meat was also more energy -efficient than cooked meat. This suggests that early people use fire for smoking before they later cooked animals.
The smoke of open fire gives meat a special aroma and is therefore still used to make foods such as sausages. Conveniently, the smoke can preserve the meat as well as salt and thus extend its durability. Smoking is therefore a traditional practice in food processing, there was long before there were modern chemical preservatives and refrigerators. But when did our ancestors find out that smoked meat lasts longer and started smoking their meat? And what came first in the Stone Age kitchen: smoking or cooking?
“It is generally recognized that the use of fire in domestic contexts was common 400,000 years ago – most likely to roast meat and maybe also for heating. But there are controversy over the previous millions of years,” explains Ran Barkai from the University of Tel Aviv. “At most archaeological sites that are older than 400,000 years, there is no evidence of the use of fire,” adds his colleague Miki Ben-Dor. For our ancestors, Homo erectus, the use of fire was not yet a matter of course, but rather a rather rare undertaking. Only in a few prehistoric locations there are signs of use of fire, but without burned bones or other references to fried meat.
Fire stations and bones of large animals: Evidence of smoking?
Ben-Dor and Barkai have therefore set up the hypothesis that the early people did not use their fire for roasting or cooking, but to smoke meat. According to previous studies, the Homo erectus mainly consumed great game, which he chased with spears. In order for the early people to divide and store the calories of these large animals, they had to smoke and dry the captured meat so that it was not rotten and was preserved for a long time, according to Ben-Dor and Barkai. The hunting prey would also have protected from bacteria, but also from predators and aa -frays.
In order to check this theory, the archaeologists searched for all known prehistoric sites with fireplaces in the existing research literature on how people used fire there. The nine foundations are between 1.8 million and 800,000 years old and thus come from the Stone Age. Three of them are located in Kenya, two in South Africa, one in Ethiopia, two in Israel and one in Spain. In addition, the team analyzed studies on the fire use and nutrition of today’s hunter and collector’s cultures and calculated how many calories of Homo erectus could have gained from the prehistoric locations.
The result: All nine sites examined contained large amounts of bones of very large animals – mainly from elephants, but also hippos, rhinos and others. An elephant delivers enough calories to feed a typical group of 25 people for a month or more, as the team’s calculations showed. A hippopotamus would have been enough for the group for about 22 days. Provided that people smoked these prey and made it edible for a long time. According to Ben-Dor and Barkai, this was probably the case.
Smoking meat delivers more calories than cooked meat
The calories from the smoked food would have been a convincing incentive to justify the effort of collecting wood and making fire. “The process of collecting fuel, inflaming a fire and its maintenance over time required considerable effort,” said Ben-Dor. Only if people got more energy from food at the time than they used when hunting and making fire, they would have bought this effort, the researchers’ argument. This would have been the case with smoked meat from elephants and Co and would have also delivered more energy over ten times more than a vegetarian diet or cooked meat, as the calculations showed.
What motivated early people to fire early was therefore rather the prospect of a safe source of food in the form of smoked large game. Only later did the roast and cooking of smaller animals probably develop from it. “It is likely that the fire, as soon as it has been produced for smoking, was occasionally used for cooking. Such use could explain evidence of frying from fish about 800,000 years ago in GESE Benot Ya’aqov,” says Barkai with a view of one of the examined prehistoric sites in Israel. After the homo erectus discovered the fire as a smoker, the early people may have used it second for other purposes, including heat, light or as protection against insects.
Source: Ran Barkai and Miki Ben-Dor (University of Tel Aviv); Frontiers in Nutrition, DOI: 10.3389/Fnut.2025.1585182
