Will history be turned upside down when a 780,000-year-old alien kitchen is discovered in the Dead Sea?

An international team of scientists working in the northern Dead Sea region claim to have found the earliest signs of cooking, which were present hundreds of thousands of years before our species, Homo sapiens, emerged.

According to Science Alert , a 780,000-year-old kitchen was discovered on the shores of the Dead Sea, an area in Israel, at an archaeological site called Gesher Benot Ya'aqov .

One of the most ancient grilled carp dishes served here is the oldest tangible evidence of humans using fire for cooking.

Some other, extinct species of human invented cooking, creating a major turning point for humanity - (Illustration from Archaeology News Network)

Charcoal and charred bone fragments have previously been found in Africa linked to Homo erectus, which may have lived around 1.5 million years ago. However, this does not confirm whether they were cooked or simply an animal burned by some ritual or natural event.

There has never been any similar evidence in Eurasia. It is even popularly believed that it was not until our Homo sapiens arose that humans learned to use fire for cooking.

The previous record-holder was a pit oven in Africa, about 170,000 years old, believed to have been made by Homo sapiens or Neanderthals, a cousin species that became extinct only 30,000-40,000 years ago and often intermingled with our ancestors.

However, with an age of 780,000 years, it is clear that the humans who lit the fire to set this new record were not our species , because Homo sapiens has only been around for more than 300,000 years.

According to archaeologist Jens Najoka from the Natural History Museum in London - UK, traces on these ancient fish pieces show that they were only grilled over fire like our grilled meat and fish, not burned directly by being thrown into the fire.

Thus, the fish was clearly cooked, meaning the obscure history of how Homo sapiens invented fire was erased.

This is a discovery of great importance to complete and rewrite human history, showing how developed the human brain and civilization were at that time.

"Acquiring the skills needed to cook food marked an important evolutionary step because it provided additional means to make optimal use of available food resources," said archaeologist Naama Goren-Inbar from the Hebrew University (Jerusalem, Israel).

The study was recently published in the scientific journal Nature Ecology and Evolution.