What cooking does is to allow the digestion of complex carbohydrates with a carnivore’s gut. It is effectively partial digestion. A raw potato is almost indigestible but a cooked one goes down fine. Cheap cat food is based on grains and other plants. Cats can eat it for the same reason – it’s been partially digested already. Whether it’s good for them is another question, of course.

Also, the idea that living in a cold climate requires fire is simply wrong. People can spend days, even weeks, without fire in the harshest climates. What it actually requires is not fire but rather clothes and some form of shelter.

I think we need to be a little more realistic about what “we” are.

Thank you, you captured my objection perfectly. And then shared it perhaps more clearly than I.

The study authors can plausibly claim there is no definitive proof of intentional fire use in Europe prior to 400,000 BCE. Subject to peer review and criticism of course. They cannot claim there is no intentional fire use prior to that date however.

Those are 2 different claims with 2 different standards of evidence required. The first assertion merely states that fire use prior to 400,000 BCE is unknown. The second assertion states that fire was not used and controlled.

Absence of evidence does not equal evidence of absence.

What this study found was that there are currently no known definite, unquestionable examples of human cooking before 400,000 years ago in Europe. Some suspected examples, but no definite examples. Well done! No one can argue with it.

Great study. Then the authors left science behind and claimed to have shown that no cooking existed in Europe before 400,000 years ago, which they “had suspected” was true before they ran their study. Well, no. They only showed that no one has yet found any unquestionable examples.

It’d be nice if more scientists followed scientific rules of evidence, and refrained from coming to conclusions without facts to support them, wouldn’t it?

The use of “Europeans” here is misleading in the extreme. These guys are not French haute-cuisine chefs.

Hey, kids! This is science, but it’s just like pro wrestling! Just wait ’til they start smashing things over each other’s heads, they’ll get this argument settled!
Vote for your favorite scientist, and you might win a trip to England. For a cookout!

Perhaps “Scientists Disagree…” would get the message across while retaining some sense of dignity for yourselves, and for us, and for science.
I expected better.

As far as the conflicting biological evidence – is it possible that sun drying meat could denature the proteins equally well to cooking over fire? If game animals were abundant to the early Europeans, perhaps they dried more meat than they cooked, thus leaving less evidence of fire behind while still evolving as one might expect on a diet of cooked meat.

Humans have been way more smart that we have given them credit for.

Also, it seems striking that they “…threw out 19 potential fire sites…” and categorically discounted the transmissability of the Israeli fire use much earlier. Knowledge is the lightest and most portable possession of all.

Hey, they might be right. However it seems a logic leap too far to declare that there was no European use of fire prior to 400,000 BCE. Not based upon this study!

It’s not good enough to say there’s no evidence. The archeological record is notoriously sparse and equivocal. To reach their conclusion, they’d have to to generate their own positive evidence that there COULD NOT BE purposeful use of fire. Show statistical analysis of bones demonstrating no consumption of cooked food (as an example; I’m not sure this is possible). Over a long period of time and over a wide geographical area. Otherwise they are just blowing academic smoke.