For centuries, we’ve asked ourselves when (and why) our ancestors first tamed fire. Was it to roast food, make light, warm the cold?
A new study from Tel Aviv University offers a provocative twist: prehistoric humans may have first harnessed fire not to cook their food, but to protect it — from predators, and from spoilage.
“Fire served two essential purposes for early humans — first, to safeguard large game from other predators and scavengers that sought to steal the ‘treasure,’ and second, to preserve the meat through smoking and drying,” write the authors in a study published in Frontiers in Nutrition.
A Rethink on a Burning Question
The use of fire is often seen as one of the key events that led to our advancement as a species. The study’s authors, Dr. Ben-Dor and Prof. Ran Barkai, re-examined fire’s earliest appearances in archaeological sites. They focused not on charred seeds or hearths, but on what was lying next to them: the bones of enormous animals.
They looked at nine sites dating back between 1.9 and 0.8 million years, from Kenya to Israel and Spain. These sites had numerous differences, but one pattern stood out. “All contained large quantities of bones from large animals — mostly elephants, but also hippopotamuses, rhinoceroses, and others,” said Dr. Ben-Dor.
For early humans, this type of massive prey offered a fantastic opportunity, but also posed a logistical dilemma. A single elephant could feed a few families for a month, but that’s if you could keep it safe from hyenas and lions (and make sure it doesn’t spoil in the meantime). A big hunt was like a bank deposit; but you needed to defend it. Fire could help with all of that.
“We understand that early humans at that time — mostly Homo erectus — did not use fire regularly, but only occasionally, in specific places and for special purposes. The process of gathering fuel, igniting a fire, and maintaining it over time required significant effort, and they needed a compelling, energy-efficient motive to do so.”
The problem is that archaeologists didn’t find clear traces of how fire was used (this would have been extremely fortunate). So, instead, they used a bioenergetic model.
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Calories In, Calories Out
In essence, this model compared the caloric payoff of various food sources and the costs associated with maintaining fire. When they compared gathering plants with hunting large animals, they found a great benefit to hunting. Cooking, meanwhile, offered modest energetic gains, insufficient to offset fire maintenance costs. In other words, fire was a costly tool. But if you could do other things with it (like smoke meat or fend off scavengers), then it would be worth it.
The study doesn’t deny that early humans eventually cooked with fire. In fact, there’s evidence that fish were roasted as early as 780,000 years ago at Gesher Benot Ya’aqov, one of the sites studied. But cooking was likely a secondary benefit — something that happened “at zero marginal energetic cost” once the fire was already burning to preserve food and keep predators at bay.
If the hypothesis holds, it reshapes the timeline of human fire use. Rather than a gradual culinary adaptation, it becomes a strategic innovation, born from necessity. It also reframes early humans not as opportunistic foragers, but as organized, meat-focused communities capable of delayed gratification and long-term planning.
In fact, Ben-Dor and Barkai have been building a challenging theory: that Homo erectus was a “hypercarnivore.” In other words, early humans’ diet and behavior were shaped by the caloric wealth of big game, and only shifted strategies as those animals disappeared from the landscape.
Not The Last Word Yet
The hypothesis is hard to confirm without tangible evidence. Some residues of smoke on the bones, or altered lipid molecules could be a smoking gun, but without such evidence, it’s still speculative.
Still, their case is compelling — and a reminder that even our most ancient behaviors may have been driven not by simple cravings, but by complex choices about risk, energy, and survival.
The fires in question were not lit by Homo sapiens, which hadn’t emerged as a species yet, but by our older cousin — Homo erectus. This long-legged hominin, with its smaller brain and robust frame, roamed Africa and Eurasia over a million years before our species emerged. It was erectus, not sapiens, who stood watch over mammoth haunches and smoked hippopotamus meat under open skies.
It wasn’t about daily life, but about seizing the exceptional: the monumental task of protecting and preserving a month’s worth of meat from rot and rival carnivores. In those moments, Homo erectus may have sparked something far more enduring than just flame.
In the flicker of those ancient fires — built not for feasting, but for vigilance and smoking meat — Homo erectus paved the way for an adaptation that would eventually transform the entire planet. And while the smoke may have long since vanished into the Paleolithic wind, its meaning lingers: a signal, not of dinner, but of ingenuity.
The study was published in the journal Frontiers in Nutrition.
