AT THIS time of year, as the temperatures drop, I find myself craving pies. I don’t know what unrecognised geniuses invented pastry and then had the idea to put a casserole inside it, but I owe them an unpayable debt. So let’s talk about the invention of cooking. How long have humans been deliberately exposing their food to heat to make it better?
You might remember a recent story reporting evidence that hominins were cooking carp fish in an earthen oven around 780,000 years ago in what is now Israel. Previously, the oldest unambiguous evidence of cooking …