30/03/2026
The first chefs on Earth may not have been our own species...
70,000 years ago, Neanderthals were cooking complex meals in caves in what is now Iraq and Greece. Not just throwing meat over a fire. Actually, combining ingredients, soaking and pounding pulses to remove their bitter husks, mixing wild grasses with lentils and nuts, and deliberately adding plants that had zero nutritional value to their food. The only reason to add something with no calories and no protein to a meal when you are a prehistoric hunter-gatherer is that it tasted better with it. They were seasoning their food!
Researchers analyzing charred food remains at Shanidar Cave in northern Iraq found that Neanderthals were pounding and soaking pulses 70,000 years ago, combining wild nuts, peas, grasses, and legumes, and at times adding wild mustard for flavor. The lead researcher on the study said she had expected to find only simple starchy roots and tubers. What she found instead was evidence of deliberate multi-step preparation and a clear understanding of different flavor profiles. "This study points to cognitive complexity and the development of culinary cultures in which flavors were significant from a very early date," she noted.
The analysis of the oldest charred food remains ever found shows that the desire to make food taste better was shared by both Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens, showing complex diets involving several steps of preparation and deliberate effort with seasoning. These were not two separate species independently discovering flavor at the same time. The evidence from Shanidar Cave and Franchthi Cave in Greece points toward something that looks a lot like a shared food culture between species that overlapped and, we now know, occasionally interbred.
The stereotype of prehistoric humans as purely survival-driven creatures eating raw meat and roots has been quietly demolished by the archaeological record over the last decade. Neanderthals buried their dead, likely made art, and cooked seasoned meals around a hearth 70,000 years before the first civilization appeared.
The desire to make food taste good is not a modern luxury; it is apparently one of the oldest human (and pre-human) impulses we have...
What do you think our long-lost cousins would have thought of modern cooking?
-Donnie
eatshistory.com
