The control of fire was a critical element of early humans' survival and evolution. But how was it first used? While researchers have long proposed that early humans used fire to cook meat, some now argue they may have harnessed it mainly to smoke meat and to scare away animals.
By calculating how much energy was gained by cooking meat on early fires, researchers determined that it was not worth the energy to build and maintain the fire for cooking alone. Instead, by smoking the meat, early humans could have ensured they could eat it for longer.
"When you hunt a big animal, you're getting about a million calories," explains Miki Ben-Dor, a paleoanthropologist at Israel's Tel Aviv University who authored the May 2025 study in the journal Frontiers in Nutrition. "And you could use it for quite some time—weeks, maybe—if you preserve it so you don't lose all of these calories."
When Did Early Humans First Use Fire?
Scientists have hypothesized that early humans started using fire about one million years ago. Some scientists suggest fire was first used even earlier by Homo erectus, who lived in Africa up to 1.9 million years ago—although studies suggest Homo erectus only "gathered" flames at the edges of wildfires and had no knowledge of making it with sticks and flints.
Ben-Dor argues early humans may have started using fire to smoke meat as far back as one million years ago. This would predate not only our own human species, Homo sapiens, but also the Neanderthals and Denisovans before us.
Many experts have accepted the idea that cooking meat was a big reason for the spread of the use of fire among humans (and it is still used, in safer forms, by humans today). But Ben-Dor and his colleagues propose that smoking it was fire’s first use among humans, with the added benefit that it kept hungry animals away.
Dried Meat Is Lighter Meat
Ben-Dor adds that smoking meat would also dry it out—raw meat is about three quarters water—and make it much lighter to carry, which would have been important to nomadic hunter-gatherers. He gave the example of modern hunter-gatherers in Africa's Congo region who hunt elephants for meat that they mostly trade to farming people who live nearby. "They dry it,” he says, “so it's much easier to carry—about quarter of the weight."
Meanwhile, fire "gathered" from wildfires could be kept going for weeks, months or even longer by carefully tending the flames and embers, which could even be transported to other sites. "There is some evidence of hunter-gatherers maintaining fire—they can keep it going for a long time while just moving it around," he says.
Cooking meat makes its proteins and fats more digestible for humans, which results in about an 8 percent increase in the energy derived from it as food, according to calculations by Ben-Dor and his co-author, Tel Aviv University archaeologist Ran Barkai. But they found that this moderate increase in energy was not enough to counter the energy needed to make the fire in the first place.
"Fire served two essential purposes for early humans—first, to guard large game from predators and scavengers that sought to seize the 'treasure,' and second, to preserve the meat through smoking and drying, preventing spoilage and allowing it to be consumed over time," the authors said in a statement. Cooking, it seemed, was only a secondary benefit.
Did Early Humans Prefer Cooked Meat Flavor?
But some other archaeologists are not convinced. Archaeologist Andrew Sorensen of Leiden University in the Netherlands, who studies the early human use of fires, argues that the energy needed to build and maintain a fire would depend on the availability of fuel—dry wood—at a particular location, and so a single estimation of the energy is not sufficient. And he questions whether smoking meat could have preserved it for that long.
"I would give them two to seven days, depending on the temperature and the season, before they would have had a problem eating it," he says.
Sorensen, whose research has determined that at least some Neanderthals knew how to make fire and not just how to gather it from wildfires, adds that cooking meat might have had consequences that could not be easily quantified as bioenergetic calculations.
"A lot of fire uses are not tangible," he says. "People could have been using fire to cook because they really liked the taste."
