World's oldest cooked meal unearthed at Shanidar cave in Iraq

Scientists have unearthed the world’s oldest cooked meal in a cave in northern Iraq. The burned food remnants, thought to be about 70,000 years old, were recovered from a Neanderthal dwelling, the Shanidar Cave site. The caves lie 500 miles north of Baghdad in the Zagros Mountains.

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Neanderthals, an extinct species or subspecies of humans, lived in Eurasia about 40,000 years ago.

They were earlier thought to have survived on berries and uncooked animal flesh. The new findings suggest otherwise.

Chris Hunt, a professor of cultural paleoecology at Liverpool John Moores University, who organized the excavation, said: “Our findings are the first real indication of complex cooking among Neanderthals.”

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Hunt and his team tried to recreate one of the recipes. They used seeds gathered from around the caves. “It made a sort of pancake-cum-flatbread which was really very palatable, a sort of nutty taste,” said Hunt.