For most of human history, over an open fire was the one and only way to cook a meal. People started cooking in this fashion nearly two million years ago, according to anthropologist Richard Wrangham, author of Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human—probably, early on, by simply tossing a raw hunk of something into the flames and watching it sizzle.

This may make modern chefs wince, but, Wrangham argues, it was likely a giant evolutionary step for mankind, providing us not only with tastier dinners, but with the extra nutrition and surplus energy necessary for generating big brains (see What Makes Us Human? Cooking, Study Says).

By the Paleolithic era, 200,000 to 40,000 years ago, we were building primitive hearths