Philip Thrift wrote:

> There is ample evidence of cooking from hearths excavated in
> paleolithic sites; it seems safe to say cooking was wide-spread
> from 100,000 BP on:
> 
>    http://anthro.palomar.edu/homo2/archaic_culture.htm

The site is nice.
However if cooking was "widespread", this only means it was known widespread.
It doesn't mean that a big percentage of the food eaten was cooked.
Furthermore it's only 100,000 years of 2,000,000 hominid evolution that are noted with "widespread fire usage"
and the internet site focusses on neanderthals (no anchestry of us).

After all, only for tubers there's an important reason to cook them: improved digestability and lectin/toxin breakdown. 
For meat there's the reason to cook it to get rid of parasites. 
On the other hand the disadvantage of loosing much of the fat.

(it's cited in your site:  "Cooking would have helped breakdown cellulose in plant foods which would have made them more digestible.  Cooking meat would  have helped kill microbial parasites that wild animals often harbor.")

If they had a reason to cook - the reason is tubers.

> There has been noted elsewhere of using giant turtle shells for cooking
> or other improvised methods. They were apparently as clever in using
> stone technology for cooking as for hunting.

We only have the stone hearths and the redened areas as indication of early fire usage.
No giant turtle shells were are found - and it's unlikely they carried such items from the coast to Olduvai or elsewhere in inner Africa. Don't you think so?

The cooking of animals with heated stones inside an earth pit would be possible.
But we only found the stone hearths, no cooking pits.
On stone hearths you can put tubers into the fire (you've probably  done this with potatoes as a child).
Or you could roast an animal on a sharp stick over the fire 
- loosing it's fat. And restricting animal consumption to an extent where I would suppose it to have been.
At a few percent meat of the diet only.
 
I think the paleohuman eating tons of roasted "megafauna" is nothing than a myth.
Real heavy meat eaters eat it raw. Inuit.

regards

Amadeus

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