Rare Ancient Charcoal Shows Prehistoric ‘Israelis’ Were Grilling 780,000 Years Ago

A new study has revealed that ancient hominins at the Gesher Benot Ya’akov site in northern Israel—“Daughters of Jacob Bridge” in Hebrew—took skillful advantage of their environment to fuel controlled fires some 780,000 years ago, demonstrating advanced cognitive abilities far earlier than previously documented. The research, published in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews, was led by archaeologists from the Institut Català de Paleoecologia Humana i Evolució Social and Bar-Ilan University in cooperation with Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Prof. Naama Goren-Inbar.

For the first time, the team identified a large number of charcoal fragments at the lakeshore site—a rare find from so ancient a context, since charcoal normally deteriorates over hundreds of thousands of years. “Our site is very unique because it is a wet site,” Goren-Inbar explained, noting that the sediments of the ancient Hula lake preserved the fragile organic material. Gesher Benot Ya’akov already offered the earliest evidence for the use of controlled fire outside Africa, and there are now three independent lines of proof: burnt fish teeth, clusters of burnt flint fragments, and the newly identified charcoals.

By analyzing the tree species represented in the charcoal, scientists were surprised to find an even wider array of wood than earlier plant studies had suggested, including ash, willow, grapevine, oleander, olive, oak, pistachio, and pomegranate—the earliest evidence of pomegranate’s presence in the Levant. Rather than selectively gathering specific trees, Gesher Benot Ya’akov hominins appear to have relied on driftwood that naturally accumulated along the lakeshore, a practical and efficient strategy of using what the landscape provided. The site’s twenty archaeological layers show that early humans returned to the same spot for roughly 100,000 years.

(TOI/VFI News)

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