At the base of a brush-covered hill in South Africas Northern Cape province, a massive stone

outcropping marks the entrance to one of humanitys oldest known dwelling places. Humans and our
apelike ancestors have lived in Wonderwerk Cave for 2 million years most recently in the early
1900s, when a farm couple and their 14 children called it home. Wonderwerk holds another
distinction as well: The cave contains the earliest solid evidence that our ancient human forebears
(probably Homo erectus) were using fire.

Like many archaeological discoveries, this one

was accidental. Researchers werent looking for
signs of prehistoric fire; they were trying to
determine the age of sediments in a section of
the cave where other researchers had found
primitive stone tools. In the process, the team
unearthed what appeared to be the remains of
campfires from a million years ago 200,000
years older than any other firm evidence of
human-controlled fire. Their findings also fanned
the flames of a decade-old debate over the
influence of fire, particularly cooking, on the
evolution of our speciess relatively capacious
brains.

At Wonderwerk, Boston University archaeologist Paul Goldberg a specialist in soil

micromorphology, or the small-scale study of sediments dug chunks of compacted dirt from the old
excavation area. He then dried them out and soaked them in a polyester resin so they would harden
to a rocklike consistency. Once the blocks solidified, researchers sawed them into wafer-thin slices.
The eureka moment came later, as the slices were examined under a microscope at Israels
Weizmann Institute. Holy cow! Goldberg exclaimed. Theres ashes in there!

He and his colleagues saw carbonized leaf and twig fragments. Looking more closely, they identified
burned bits of animal bones as well. The bones sharp edges, and the excellent preservation of the
plant ash, indicated that neither wind nor rain had ushered in the burnt material. The burning clearly
had occurred inside the cave.

Then team member Francesco Berna subjected the sample to a test called Fourier transform infrared
microspectroscopy (FTIR), which analyzes a materials composition by measuring the way it absorbs
infrared waves. Often used in crime labs to identify traces of drugs and fibers, FTIR can also
determine the temperature to which organic matter has been heated and Berna is among the first
to adapt it for archaeology. When he ran an FTIR analysis on one of the sediment slices, the samples
infrared signature showed that the cave material had been heated to between 750 and 1,300 degrees
Fahrenheit. That was just right for a small fire made of twigs and grasses.

The Cooking Hypothesis

When the team announced its findings in April 2012, it added fuel to a controversy thats been
smoldering since 1999. That year, influential primatologist Richard Wrangham proposed a theory of
human origins called the cooking hypothesis. Wrangham aimed to fill a gap in the story of how early
hominins like Australopithecus essentially, apes that walked upright evolved into modern Homo
sapiens. Evolutionary science shows that our distant progenitors became bipedal 6 million to 7 million
years ago. Archaeologists believe early hominins evolved bigger brains as they walked, took up
hunting and developed more complex social structures. That process led to the emergence of Homo
habilis, the first creature generally regarded as human, 2.3 million years ago. Yet H. habilis brain
was only moderately larger than Australopithecus, and its body retained many apelike features. No
one knows why, just 500,000 years later, a radically more advanced species Homo erectus
emerged. Its brain was up to twice the size of its predecessors, its teeth were much smaller, and its
body was quite similar to ours.
Wrangham credits the transformation to the harnessing of fire. Cooking food, he argues, allowed for
easier chewing and digestion, making extra calories available to fuel energy-hungry brains. Firelight
could ward off nighttime predators, allowing hominins to sleep on the ground, or in caves, instead of
in trees. No longer needing huge choppers, heavy-duty guts or a branch swingers arms and
shoulders, they could instead grow mega-craniums. The altered anatomy of H. erectus, Wrangham
wrote, indicates that these beings, like us, were creatures of flame.

There was one major problem with this hypothesis, however: Proving it would require evidence of
controlled fire from at least 1.8 million years ago, when the first H. erectus appeared.

Previous Sparks

The clues indicating early use of fire tend to be subtle; its easy to miss them, but its also easy to see
them when theyre not really there. What looks like charring on a rock or bone, for example, often
turns out to be staining from minerals or fungus. And high-tech analytic techniques dont always
banish the ambiguity.

In recent decades, a number of sites have vied for the title of earliest human-controlled fire. At Koobi
Fora and Chesowanja, both in Kenya, small patches of reddened soil were found in areas containing
stone tools up to 1.5 million years old. To try to prove that Early Stone Age campfires caused the
discoloration, researchers in the 1980s and 90s used techniques such as magnetic susceptibility
analysis and thermoluminescence dating. The first tool detects burned earth by gauging fluctuations
in its magnetic field; the second determines how long ago an object was heated by measuring the
photons it emits when baked in a lab. Although these methods showed that burning had occurred, the
evidence is simply too sparse to convince most archaeologists that humans not wildfires or
lightning were responsible.

Another promising site is a South African cave called Swartkrans, where archaeologists in the 80s
found burned bones in a section dating between 1 million and 1.5 million years ago. In 2004, Williams
College chemist Anne Skinner analyzed the bones using electron spin resonance, which estimates
the temperature to which an artifact has been heated by measuring molecular fragments called free
radicals. She determined that the bones had reached at least 900 degrees too hot for most
wildfires, but consistent with a campfire. But since the cave has a gaping mouth and a downward-
sloping floor, naysayers argue that the objects might have washed in later after being burned outside.

Until the Wonderwerk Cave find, Gesher Benot Yaaqov, a lakeside site in Israel, was considered to
have the oldest generally accepted evidence of human-controlled fire. There, a team of scientists
found traces of numerous hearths dating to between 690,000 and 790,000 years ago. A wide range of
clues made this site convincing, including isolated clusters of burned flint, as if toolmakers had been
knapping hand axes by several firesides. The team also found fragments of burned fruit, grain and
wood scattered about.

Then came Wonderwerk. The ash-filled sediment that Goldberg and Berna found came from a spot
approximately 100 feet from the entrance to the tunnel-like cave, too far to have been swept in by the
elements. The team also found circular chips of fractured stone known as pot-lid flakes telltale
signs of fire in the same area. These clues turned up throughout the million-year-old layer of
sediment, indicating that fires had burned repeatedly at the site.

Digging Deeper
Does that mean fire drove the evolution of H. erectus? Is the cooking hypothesis correct? The
occupants who left these ashes at Wonderwerk lived nearly a million years after the emergence of H.
erectus. Goldberg and Berna point out that its unclear whether the caves inhabitants knew how to
start a fire from scratch or depended on flames harvested from grass fires outside the cave. If they
were eating barbecue, it may have been only an occasional luxury. Whether that could have had an
impact on human development remains an open question.
Finding the answers will require more digging. At
Wonderwerk, team members plan to probe deeper,
analyzing sediments up to 1.8 million years old, for
evidence of fire. And they are using their cutting-edge
detection methods at other early H. erectus sites as
well. If you dont look, youre not going to find it,
Goldberg
says.
Food For Thought: Meat-Based Diet Made Us Smarter

Om Nom Nom: As we
began to shy away from
eating primarily fruit,
leaves and nuts and
began eating meat, our
brains grew. We
developed the capacity to
use tools, so our need for
large, sharp teeth and big
grinders waned. From left,
a cast of teeth from a
chimpanzee,
Australopithecus afarensis
and a modern human.

Our earliest ancestors ate their food raw fruit, leaves, maybe some nuts. When they ventured
down onto land, they added things like underground tubers, roots and berries.

It wasn't a very high-calorie diet, so to get the energy you needed, you had to eat a lot and have a big
gut to digest it all. But having a big gut has its drawbacks.

"You can't have a large brain and big guts at the same time," explains Leslie Aiello, an anthropologist
and director of the Wenner-Gren Foundation in New York City, which funds research on evolution.
Digestion, she says, was the energy-hog of our primate ancestor's body. The brain was the poor
stepsister who got the leftovers.

Until, that is, we discovered meat.

"What we think is that this dietary change around 2.3 million years ago was one of the major
significant factors in the evolution of our own species," Aiello says.

That period is when cut marks on animal bones appeared not a predator's tooth marks, but
incisions that could have been made only by a sharp tool. That's one sign of our carnivorous
conversion. But Aiello's favorite clue is somewhat ickier it's a tapeworm. "The closest relative of
human tapeworms are tapeworms that affect African hyenas and wild dogs," she says.

So sometime in our evolutionary history, she explains, "we actually shared saliva with wild dogs and
hyenas." That would have happened if, say, we were scavenging on the same carcass that hyenas
were.

But dining with dogs was worth it. Meat is packed with lots of calories and fat. Our brain which
uses about 20 times as much energy as the equivalent amount of muscle piped up and said,
"Please, sir, I want some more."
Carving Up The Diet
As we got more, our guts shrank because we didn't need a giant vegetable processor any more. Our
bodies could spend more energy on other things like building a bigger brain. Sorry, vegetarians, but
eating meat apparently made our ancestors smarter smart enough to make better tools, which in
turn led to other changes, says Aiello.

"If you look in your dog's mouth and cat's mouth, and open up your own mouth, our teeth are quite
different," she says. "What allows us to do what a cat or dog can do are tools."

Tools meant we didn't need big sharp teeth like other predators. Tools even made vegetable matter
easier to deal with. As anthropologist Shara Bailey at New York University says, they were like
"external" teeth.

"Your teeth are really for processing food, of course, but if you do all the food processing out here,"
she says, gesturing with her hands, "if you are grinding things, then there is less pressure for your
teeth to pick up the slack."

Our teeth, jaws and mouth changed as well as our gut.

A Tough Bite To Swallow

But adding raw meat to our diet doesn't tell the whole food story, according to anthropologist Richard
Wrangham. Wrangham invited me to his apartment at Harvard University to explain what he believes
is the real secret to being human. All I had to do was bring the groceries, which meant a steak
which I thought could fill in for wildebeest or antelope and a turnip, a mango, some peanuts and
potatoes.

As we slice up the turnip and put the potatoes in a pot, Wrangham explains that even after we started
eating meat, raw food just didn't pack the energy to build the big-brained, small-toothed modern
human. He cites research that showed that people on a raw food diet, including meat and oil, lost a
lot of weight. Many said they felt better, but also experienced chronic energy deficiency. And half the
women in the experiment stopped menstruating.

It's not as if raw food isn't nutritious; it's just harder for the body to get at the nutrition.

Wrangham urges me to try some raw turnip. Not too bad, but hardly enough to get the juices flowing.
"They've got a tremendous amount of caloric energy in them," he says. "The problem is that it's in the
form of starch, which unless you cook it, does not give you very much."

Then there's all the chewing that raw food requires. Chimps, for example, sometimes chew for six
hours a day. That actually consumes a lot of energy.

"Plato said if we were regular animals, you know, we wouldn't have time to write poetry," Wrangham
jokes. "You know, he was right."

Tartare No More
One solution might have been to pound food, especially meat like the steak I brought. "If our
ancestors had used stones to mash the meat like this," Wrangham says as he demonstrates with a
wooden mallet, "then it would have reduced the difficulty they would have had in digesting it."

But pounding isn't as good as cooking that steak, says Wrangham. And cooking is what he thinks
really changed our modern body. Someone discovered fire no one knows exactly when and
then someone got around to putting steak and veggies on the barbeque. And people said, "Hey, let's
do that again."

Besides better taste, cooked food had other benefits cooking killed some pathogens on food.

But cooking also altered the meat itself. It breaks up the long protein chains, and that makes them
easier for stomach enzymes to digest. "The second thing is very clear," Wrangham adds, "and that is
the muscle, which is made of protein, is wrapped up like a sausage in a skin, and the skin is collagen,
connective tissue. And that collagen is very hard to digest. But if you heat it, it turns to jelly."

As for starchy foods like turnips, cooking gelatinizes the tough starch granules and makes them
easier to digest too. Even just softening food which cooking does makes it more digestible. In
the end, you get more energy out of the food.

Yes, cooking can damage some good things in raw food, like vitamins. But Wrangham argues that
what's gained by cooking far outweighs the losses.

As I cut into my steak (Wrangham is a vegetarian; he settles for the mango and potatoes), Wrangham
explains that cooking also led to some of the finer elements of human behavior: it encourages people
to share labor; it brings families and communities together at the end of the day and encourages
conversation and story-telling all very human activities.

"Ultimately, of course, what makes us intellectually human is our brain," he says. "And I think that
comes from having the highest quality of food in the animal kingdom, and that's because we cook."

So, as the Neanderthals liked to say around the campfire: bon appetit.