It was an ordinary day. Anxious for a fabulous Thanksgiving Dinner at my daughter-in-law's mother's home in nearby Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania. My wife, Carol and I, will join Etta and her daughter Barbara, Barb's husband and our son, Derek, Etta's other daughter Joy and our other son, Tad just as we have done the past dozen or so years to celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday with a traditional turkey feast in Etta's dining room. All the traditional fixings compliment the meal which more than covers the dinner table at her home. We never go home with an empty stomach! Our families are part of a long human Thanksgiving history...one that's older than our species. Seems that our human cousins have been using fire to cook their food for almost two million years, long before Homo sapiens showed up for Thanksgiving! A recent study found evidence of rudimentary cooking: the leftovers of a roasted carp dinner from 780,000 years ago. Cooking food marked more than just a lifestyle change for our ancestors. It helped fuel our evolution, give us bigger brains...and later down the line, would become the centerpiece of the feasting rituals that brought communities together and eventually celebrating holidays such as Thanksgiving. The story of human evolution has appeared to be the story of what we eat. A new study was based on material from a watery site on the shores of an ancient lake. Artifacts from the area suggest it was home to a community of Homo Erectus, an extinct species of early humans that walked upright. Years of digging at the site found fish remains, especially fish teeth. The teeth were from a couple of species of big carp which were found around a site where there were signs of fire being used. Testing revealed the teeth of fish had been exposed to temperatures that were hot, but not super-hot. This suggested that the fish were cooked low and slow, rather than just tossed on a fire. It was concluded that humans harnessed fire for cooking more than three quarters of a million years ago. That's much earlier than the next oldest evidence for cooking, which showed Stone Age humans ate charred roots in South Africa. But, physical evidence has been hard to find. So, today, as we celebrate Thanksgiving Day, we will try and make sure that remains of our Thanksgiving dinner remain in Etta's back yard. I am taking my shovel with me to dinner in hopes of burying leftovers in Etta's backyard so thousand's of years from now, someone will find the remains and know that we had a great meal of turkey, stuffing, and all the fixings. Happy Thanksgiving to one and all on this Thanksgiving Day! It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment