Qesem Cave Site New Finding

[PaleoPhil]

(This talks about cooking, so I'm submitting it to Hot Topics)

A new finding has been reported at the Qesem Cave site in Israel. Before 200k years ago, hunters butchered their meat differently.

"The cut marks we are finding are both more abundant and more randomly oriented than those observed in later times, such as the Middle and Upper Paleolithic periods," says Prof. Avi Gopher of TAU's Department of Archaeology. "What this could mean is that either one person from the clan butchered the group's meat in a few episodes over time, or multiple persons hacked away at it in tandem," he interprets. ....

The Qesem Cave finds demonstrate that man was at the top of the food chain during this period, but that they shared the meat differently than their later cousins. The TAU excavators and Prof. Mary Stiner of the University of Arizona (Tucson) hypothesize that the Qesem Cave people hunted cooperatively. After the hunt, they carried the highest-quality body parts of their prey back to the cave, where the meat was cut using stone-blade tools and then cooked on the fire.

.... The cave contains the remains of animal bones dating back to 400,000 years ago. Most of the remains are from fallow deer, others from wild ancestors of horse, cattle, pig, and even some tortoise. ....

American Friends of Tel Aviv University (2009, October 14). 200,000-year-old Cut Of Meat: Archaeologists Shed Light On Life, Diet And Society Before The Delicatessen. ScienceDaily. Retrieved October 14, 2009, from http://www.sciencedaily.com­ /releases/2009/10/091014111547.htm

[TylerDurden]

There've been similiar claims before such as at Zhoukoudian(c.500,000 years ago re date). Unfortunately Zhoukoudian was condemned re evidence as it turned out the evidence was wrongly dated and there was evidence that the remains of animals had been shifted from other areas via geological processes and the like. Simply put, the only good claims re cooking are from 300,000 years ago at the most(though fire may have been invented 200,000 years earlier).

[SkinnyDevil]

I'd like to know what evidence there is that the met was cooked.

I've read that they used to think cooking took place as long ago as 250,000+ years ago, but that it turned out the cooking art was mostly assumption. Most anthropologists now think humans may have domesticated fire way back then, but that we didn't cook until 10,000-40,000 years ago (and not necessarily wide-spread at that until the neolithic agricultural revolution).

[alphagruis]

Evidence re cooking 300 ky ago just implies cooking was possibly in use at least by 300 ky ago. Thus cooking might have been even practised much earlier, in particular because earlier remains are less and less likely to be found and correctly interpreted as one looks for farther in the past.
Maybe we've developed some minor adaptation to cooked food when compared with other primates. Yet, i guess that multicellular organisms most likely cannot seriously ever adapt to it at least to the degree they have adapted to raw food. Bacteria certainly can.
So, whatever the time elapsed since man cooked for the first time his food,  the adverse effects of cooking might well remain a serious issue.        

[TylerDurden]

Evidence re cooking 300 ky ago just implies cooking was possibly in use at least by 300 ky ago. Thus cooking might have been even practised much earlier, in particular because earlier remains are less and less likely to be found and correctly interpreted as one looks for farther in the past.
Maybe we've developed some minor adaptation to cooked food when compared with other primates. Yet, i guess that multicellular organisms most likely cannot seriously ever adapt to it at least to the degree they have adapted to raw food. Bacteria certainly can.
So, whatever the time elapsed since man cooked for the first time his food,  the adverse effects of cooking might well remain a serious issue.         

The only mass evidence for cooking comes from c.300,000 years ago onwards. The very fact that, before that time, claims re evidence for cooking are few and far between strongly indicates that cooking didn't start until the 300K period. If it was just a question of older data/evidence not surviving, then one would expect a gradual drop in evidence as time went on , whereas there is a sudden massive drop in evidence before the 300k period.

[TylerDurden]

I'd like to know what evidence there is that the met was cooked.

I've read that they used to think cooking took place as long ago as 250,000+ years ago, but that it turned out the cooking art was mostly assumption. Most anthropologists now think humans may have domesticated fire way back then, but that we didn't cook until 10,000-40,000 years ago (and not necessarily wide-spread at that until the neolithic agricultural revolution).

Oh, where did you get that? The only claims I've heard re cooking starting 10,000 to 40,000 years ago came from aajonus and raw vegan circles.

[instant]

You can find evidence to support any idea you want to have..

[PaleoPhil]

The link to the article was broken, here's a working link: Qesem Cave

The article didn't specifically mention cooking remains dating as far back as 400,000 years ago and it focused on remains from 200,000 years ago. There are fewer traces of fires in the soil strata that date back earlier than 200k years ago. Since I thought cooking was already widely accepted as dating back to 250,000 years ago, that 200k figure didn't phase me. I was more interested in the fact that here is more evidence that hominids were butchering and eating large quantities of meat hundreds of thousands of years ago and that the way meat was butchered changed in at least one area at around 200k years ago, and if this evidence is buttressed by other evidence, it may cause scientists to decide that meat eating was prevalent long before advanced cooperation was. But you should read the materials yourselves and draw up your own hypotheses if you wish.

Since people seem more interested in the cooking/fire aspect, here is more on that:

Fire
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qesem_Cave

The Qesem Cave contains one of the earliest examples of regular use of fire in the Lower Pleistocene. Large quantities of burnt bone, defined by a combination of microscopic and macroscopic criteria, and moderately heated soil lumps suggest butchering and prey-defleshing occurred near fireplaces.

10-36% of identified bone specimens show signs of burning and on unidentified bone ones it could be up to 84%. Such heat reached 500 degrees C.[5]

Hunted prey

Bones from 4,740 prey animals have been identified. These are mostly large mammals such as fallow deer (73–76% of identified specimens), aurochs, horse, wild pig, wild goat, roe deer, wild ass and red deer. Tortoise and a rare rhinoceros remains have also been found but no gazelle bones.[6]

These animal bones show marks of butchery, marrow extraction and burning from fire. Analysis of the orientation and anatomical placements of the cut marks suggest meat and connective tissue was cut off in a planned manner from the bone.[6]

Deer remains are limited to limb bones and head parts without remains of vertebrae, ribs, pelvis, or feet suggesting that butchery was selective in regard to the body parts that had been carried to the cave following initial butchery of the animal carcasses elsewhere.[6]

Moreover the presence of fetal bones and the absence of deer antlers implies that much of the hunting took place in late winter through early summer. At this time the need for additional fat in the diet would have been made them particularly important food. The excavators described this as “prime-age-focused harvesting, a uniquely human predator–prey relationship”. [6]

Re: the selection of deer heads and limbs: It sounds like that for the lean animals like deer, the hunters were keeping the brains ("head parts") and marrow ("limb bones"), and perhaps some choice organs, and were discarding much of the meat. This confirms what Ray Audette and others have proposed about Stone Agers selecting the fattiest parts and discarding some of the lean, which would probably make Cordain and Eaton's low-fat calculations based on whole carcasses somewhat misleading. I had suspected that Audette was right about the diet of Stone Agers being high fat and Cordain/Eaton wrong, and it looks like we've got some hard data to support that. However, for larger, fattier animals, like aurochs, perhaps Stone Agers did not discard the lean parts, because this article only mentions deer remains revealing such selection. I wonder what the % of calories that come from fat was for a whole auroch carcass.

Evidence for habitual use of fire at the end of the
Lower Paleolithic: Site-formation processes at Qesem Cave, Israel
http://www.tau.ac.il/humanities/archaeology/info/ran_barkai/HabitualUseofFireJHE2007.pdf

A number of other Lower Paleolithic sites, including some Acheulo-Yabrudian cases, have yielded burnt materials that have been interpreted as hearth traces (Tsatskin, 2000; Meignen et al., 2001; Goren-Inbar et al., 2004; Rolland, 2004; Preece et al., 2006). The findings at Qesem Cave extend beyond the identification of burnt remains in the sediments, however, in that the archaeological and geological evidence supports a ‘‘residential base’’ scenario. Hearths formed hubs around which other activities were carried out in the cave; use-wear damage on blades and blade tools in conjunction with numerous cut marks and impact fractures on large bones indicate an emphasis on prey butchering, defleshing, and marrow extraction in the vicinity of fireplaces. Hominin use of fire during the late Lower Paleolithic at Qesem Cave seems to have been grossly similar to the behavioral patterns observed in later Middle Paleolithic populations in the Levant region.

The multidimensional approach advocated by this study illustrates the difficulties for field identification of burnt materials and matrix, particularly in the absence of visible charcoal. Under favorable preservational conditions, however, the microscopic analysis of intact structures can reveal the true nature of the sediment and whether or not there is wood ash (e.g., Weiner et al., 1998; Goldberg et al., 2001).