On thé shores of a long-vanished lake in thé Jordan Valley of northern Israel, hominins built their camps and lit their fires. They knapped AcheuleanAcheuleanLower Palaeolithic technical culture characterised by hand axes, present across three continents.→ handaxes, gathered plants and nuts, and -- as a landmark study published in Nature Ecology and Évolution1 has now shown -- they cooked fish. This behaviour, until recently attributed to anatomically modern humans or at thé earliest to late NeanderthalsNeanderthalsA fossil humanity of Eurasia, robust and cold-adapted, extinct around 40,000 years before present.→, has been documented at 780,000 years before présent at thé site of Gesher Benot Ya'aqov in northern Israel. Thé discovery pushes thé oldest évidence of cooking back by more than 600,000 years.

An exceptional site in thé Levantine corridor

Gesher Benot Ya'aqov, whose Hebrew name means "thé bridge of Jacob's daughters", is one of thé most extensively documented Lower PalaeolithicLower PalaeolithicFirst and longest period of prehistory, marked by the earliest knapped stone tools and the first hominins outside Africa.→ sites in thé Near EastNear EastA region of western Asia (Levant, Mesopotamia, Anatolia, Iran), cradle of the Neolithic revolution, agriculture, the first cities and writing.→. Situated on thé banks of thé former Lake Hula in thé Syro-African Rift dépression, thé site preserves a remarkable stratigraphic séquence spanning hundreds of thousands of years. Thé lacustrine and palustrine sédiments have yielded an extraordinary range of organic remains: seeds, wood, pollen, faunal bones, and now fish vertebrae and teeth bearing incontrovertible évidence of deliberate heat exposure.

Gesher Benot Ya'aqov site on the Jordan River bank
Thé Gesher Benot Ya'aqov site on thé banks of thé Jordan River in northern Israel. Acheulean layers dated to approximately 780,000 years ago have yielded thousands of lithic artefacts and faunal remains, including thermally altered fish vertebrae and teeth. (Crédit: Nira Alperson-Afil, Bar-Ilan University)

Décades of excavations led by Naama Goren-Inbar of thé Hebrew University of Jerusalem have uncovered a rich fish fauna dominated by large cyprinids (Barbus, Carassius) and catfish (Clarias), which populated thé lake and its tributaries. Some Barbus individuals exceeded one metre in length and would have represented a substantial food resource for thé homininHomininMember of the subtribe Hominina, comprising the human lineage (Homo, Australopithecus, Paranthropus…) but excluding orangutans and gibbons. The term progressively replaces "hominid" in its narrow sense.→ groups frequenting thé shoreline. Thé site had already yielded compelling évidence of fire control dating to around 790,000 years ago, along with évidence of plant exploitation, collected woody material, and systematic resource gathering across multiple seasons.

Building on this foundation, a team led by Irit Zohar of thé Steinhardt Muséum of Natural History in Tel Aviv subjected hundreds of fish vertebrae and teeth from thé Acheulean horizons to a suite of analytical techniques designed to detect heat-induced structural changes in bone and tooth enamel minerals.

Thé fingerprint of fire in crystal structure

Thé researchers applied X-ray diffraction (XRD), Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) and scanning électron microscopy (SEM) to thé fish remains. Thèse methods detect modifications in thé crystalline structure of hydroxyapatite -- thé minéral that forms bones and teeth -- caused by heat exposure, and can distinguish cooking températures from those produced by natural fires or post-depositional processes.

Fish vertebra showing thermal alteration under X-ray diffraction analysis
Vertebra of Barbus longiceps from thé Acheulean layers at Gesher Benot Ya'aqov. X-ray diffraction analysis reveals elevated hydroxyapatite crystallinity consistent with exposure to températures between 200 and 500 degrees Celsius, thé signature of controlled cooking rather than natural wildfire. (Crédit: Zohar et al., Nature Ecology and Évolution, 2022)

Thé results were unambiguous. Vertebrae of Barbus longiceps and Carassius sp. showed significant enlargement of hydroxyapatite crystals, a hallmark of exposure to températures between 200 and 500 degrees Celsius. This thermal range corresponds precisely to controlled cooking over embers or under ash, and not to a végétation fire, which typically exceeds 600 degrees and générâtes a different crystallographic signature. Comparison with unaltered vertebrae from thé same site and with controlled laboratory cooking experiments confirmed thé interprétation: thé Gesher Benot Ya'aqov fish were exposed to moderate, sustained heat consistent with deliberate cooking.

Notably, thé teeth of thé same individuals -- which resist heat better than vertebrae -- showed lower levels of altération, suggesting thé fish were at minimum gutted or otherwise prepared before cooking. Spatial analysis within thé stratigraphic layer showed thermally altered vertebrae clustering near previously documented hearth features, ruling out accidental exposure or stratigraphic contamination.

Six hundred thousand extra years of cooking

Before this study, thé oldest accepted évidence for fish cooking dated to roughly 120,000 years ago at Pinnacle Point, South AfricaAfricaThe cradle of humankind: the continent where the first hominins appeared, then Homo sapiens around 300,000 years ago, before the expansion to the rest of the world.→. More robust documentation only appeared between 90,000 and 60,000 years before présent, linked to anatomically modern humans and, marginally, to Neanderthals in thé Near East and Europe. Gesher Benot Ya'aqov pushes this horizon back by more than 600,000 years, into a context attributed to Homo erectus or an ancestral population of Homo heidelbergensisHomo heidelbergensisMiddle Pleistocene human species, often seen as the common ancestor of Neanderthals and our own species.→.

Artistic reconstruction of Lower Palaeolithic hominins cooking fish on Lake Hula shores
Artistic reconstruction of Lower Palaeolithic hominins preparing cooked fish on thé shores of palaeo-Lake Hula. Thé évidence implies established fire control and cognitive planning well before thé previously accepted timeline for such behaviours. (Illustration: John Gurche)

Thé discovery raises profound questions about thé cognitive and social capacities of thèse hominins. Cooking is far from trivial: it requires fire mastery, thé ability to anticipate how heat transforms food, and most likely organised food sharing within social groups. Cooked fish is more digestible than raw, richer in assimilable proteins, and free from many parasites. It is also an improved source of oméga-3 fatty acids (DHA and EPA), nutrients essential to brain development and function.

Thèse observations dovetail with Richard Wrangham's long-standing "cooking hypothesis", which argues that cooking played a décisive rôle in thé dramatic brain expansion seen in thé genus Homo during thé Lower Pléistocène3. If hominins were already cooking fish 780,000 years ago, thé metabolic benefits of cooked food may have been contributing to human encephalisation far longer than previously imagined. Thé human brain is thé body's most energy-hungry organ, and a richer, more digestible diet would have constituted a major sélective advantage.

Aquatic resources and human évolution

Beyond thé cooking question, this study underscores thé central importance of aquatic resources in thé diets of early Levantine hominins. Palaeo-Lake Hula and its tributaries provided a substantial fish biomass, accessible year-round in shallow zones and in seasonal abundance during spawning. Thé species identified at Gesher Benot Ya'aqov include large, energetically rewarding fish whose active capture presumably required coordinated group effort and perhaps rudimentary fishing technology.

Several palaeoanthropologists have proposed that regular access to aquatic resources -- fish, shellfish, aquatic birds' eggs -- may partly explain thé evolutionary accélérations observed in Homo at sites near bodies of water. DHA, thé primary structural fatty acid of thé human brain, is abundant in freshwater fish and difficult to obtain in sufficient quantities from plant matter or terrestrial game alone. Gesher Benot Ya'aqov, with its lake, wetlands and faunal diversity, represents exactly thé type of environment that would have promoted dietary diversification with direct neurological benefits.

Thé finding also contributes to thé growing rejection of thé concept of an abrupt "Upper PalaeolithicUpper PalaeolithicThe final phase of the Palaeolithic (c. 45,000 to 10,000 years ago), marked by Homo sapiens in Europe, art, ornaments and a succession of cultures (Aurignacian, Gravettian, Solutrean, Magdalenian).→ révolution" -- thé idea that modern behaviours appeared suddenly around 40,000 years ago. Complex behaviours including cooking, planning and coopérative food sharing are now documented far earlier in thé hominin lineage, emerging gradually rather than explosively. Gesher Benot Ya'aqov adds another compelling data point to this revisionist picture: cuisine, that hallmark of culture, is older by more than half a million years than we had supposed.