Fish-loving Bengal can tuck into this: the world’s first cooked meal was freshwater fish.

The teeth of two fish species from the carp family found at a site near the Jordan river in Israel represent the earliest evidence of cooking by human ancestors 780,000 years ago, archaeologists announced on Monday.

Until now, the charred remains of starchy wild root vegetables — a source of carbohydrates — in a cave in South Africa and dated to about 170,000 years ago were viewed as evidence of the earliest cooking.

“This find (the fish teeth) pushes back the antiquity of cooking by more than 600,000 years,” said Irit Zohar, a researcher at The Steinhardt Museum of Natural History in Tel Aviv University, and the curator of biological collections at the Oranim Academic College who led the study.

This also means that the title of the world’s first cooks goes to Homo erectus rather than Homo sapiens, or modern humans, Zohar told The Telegraph through email.

The researchers said the location, distribution patterns and state of the fish remains at the early stone age site called Gesher Benot Ya’aqov provide multiple lines of evidence that the fish had been cooked and consumed on site.

Scientists have long hypothesised that an extinct human ancestor called Homo erectus — which lived in Africa and Eurasia from 1.8 million years to 250,000 years ago —had discovered the controlled use of fire between 1.7 million and 800,000 years ago.

Homo sapiens emerged about 200,000 years ago.

Archaeologists had in 2004 identified — on the basis of burned fragments of flint, wood and other material — Gesher Benet Ya’aqov as a site where early humans controlled fire.

Now, Zohar and her colleagues have analysed over 39,000 fish remains from several archaeological layers with evidence of controlled fire and found that two fish species dominate the remains — Luciobarbus longiceps accounting for over 46 per cent, and Carasobarbus canis making up 10 per cent.

Any natural accumulation of fish remains would have displayed a greater diversity of species.

Their analysis showed that 99 per cent of the remains were teeth and they were all found in association with what appeared to be hearths. The conspicuous absence of fish bones, the scientists believe, could have resulted from cooking with controlled heat for a prolonged time.

A technique called X-ray powder diffraction on the teeth at the National History Museum, London, indicated that they were not burnt but cooked in moderate heat at temperatures less than 500 degrees Celsius, the scientists said, presenting their findings in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution on Monday. As the fish cooked at temperatures between 200 and 500 degrees Celsius, the bones would soften and disintegrate but the teeth would be preserved.

Zohar said both the species that dominated the Gesher Benet Ya’aqov site are still found in the Jordan river basin and Lake Kinneret, also called the Sea of Galilee, but in much smaller sizes.

The study’s findings underscore the role of wetland habitats in offering a stable and year-round source of food that the scientists say could have played an important role in the migration of human ancestors across Asia.