Earliest human use of fire for cooking has been dated at how many years ago?
Cooking advanced scientific techniques to food preparation to further enhance the flavor of the dish served. Phylogenetic analysis suggests that human ancestors may have invented cooking as far back as 1.8 million to 2.3 million years ago. Re-analysis of burnt bone fragments and plant ashes from the Wonderwerk Cave, South Africa, has provided evidence supporting control of fire by early humans there by 1 million years ago. There is evidence that "Homo erectus" was cooking their food as early as 500,000 years ago. Evidence for the controlled use of fire by "Homo erectus" beginning some 400,000 years ago has wide scholarly
Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human and the "Telegraph" (UK) called it "that rare thing, an exhilarating science book". Critics of the cooking hypothesis question whether archaeological evidence supports the view that cooking fires began long enough ago to confirm Wrangham's findings. The traditional explanation is that human ancestors scavenged carcasses for high-quality food that preceded the evolutionary shift to smaller guts and larger brains. Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human (2009) is a book by British primatologist Richard Wrangham, published by Profile Books in England, and Basic Books in the USA. It argues the hypothesis that cooking