Homo erectus cooking food.?

Question

does any know why homo erectus started to cook meat? i had thought maybe it had something to do with them burning themselves and discovering 'cooked' meat.

Answer 1

Almost any hypothesis may be considered & we will never know for sure.  I like to think an animal was killed by a lightening strike & roasted in the ensueing fire, then erectus, being a scavenger, ate the meat & loved the taste. Perhaps they ate animals killed by wild fires & noticed that predators were afraid of the fire?  At any rate, we can't prove or disprove any hypothesis, so make up one of your own & look for evidence to support it.

Answer 2

How COULD we know?

Uh, I doubt it had to do with their burning themselves, as they ate other meat than human.

It may have been a coming across a partly burned animal carcass, or had something to do with plants.

The thing is, there wasn't YouTube with people recording it and popping it on the web for all to see.

Answer 3

I like to think he or she was clever enough to figure it out. imagine hunting down an animal then eating the meat raw. It would be pretty rough and hard, our teeth are not made for that sort of thing. So maybe they figured that burning it would make it softer, but didn't know how it would taste.

Answer 4

Cooked food tasted better, and it was easier to eat. As well, it kept longer after cooking.

Answer 5

The date on this, the oldest known cooking fire is 1-1.5 million years old.

http://mathildasanthropologyblog.wordpre...