The earliest known cooking oil came from olives, produced along the Mediterranean coast of what is now Israel roughly 7,600 years ago. But the story doesn’t end there. Across the ancient world, different civilizations independently figured out how to extract oil from the plants growing around them, creating distinct cooking oil traditions that still define regional cuisines today.
The Oldest Evidence: Olive Oil in the Levant
The submerged prehistoric settlement of Kfar Samir, off the Carmel coast near modern Haifa, holds the earliest confirmed record of oil production. Underwater archaeologists discovered thousands of crushed olive stones packed into stone pits, with about 73% of the pits showing the sharp, fractured edges that come from deliberate crushing rather than natural decay. Microscopic analysis confirmed fragments of olive skin and pulp mixed throughout, and radiocarbon dating placed the oldest samples at roughly 6,500 years before present, with some estimates reaching back to 7,600 years ago.
The toolkit was simple but effective: stone crushing basins to break the fruit open, pits to collect the mashed pulp, and woven straining baskets to separate the oil from the solid waste. Interestingly, the archaeological record suggests people were pressing olives for oil before they started pickling them as table food. A nearby site, Hishuley Carmel, shows evidence of whole olives stored in stone basins for pickling, but that site dates to roughly 500 years after Kfar Samir.
By the Early Bronze Age (around 3900 to 2500 BCE), olive oil production had scaled up dramatically. Pollen records from across the Mediterranean show a massive surge in olive tree cultivation during this period, with forests of oak and pine giving way to olive groves. The volume of pollen suggests production far exceeded what local communities needed, pointing to organized trade. Old Kingdom Egypt was a major driver of demand, and the number of pressing facilities and oil storage vessels found from this era reflects a society increasingly built around olive horticulture.
Large-scale olive cultivation in the southeastern Mediterranean preceded similar efforts in Greece, Turkey, Italy, Spain, and Portugal by roughly 3,000 years. Those western Mediterranean traditions, which would eventually become the backbone of European cooking, trace their roots back to techniques first developed along the Levantine coast.
Sesame Oil in the Indus Valley
While olive oil dominated the Mediterranean, a completely separate oil tradition was developing in South Asia. Excavations at Harappa, one of the great cities of the Indus Valley Civilization in modern Pakistan, yielded charred sesame seeds from layers dating to 3050 to 3500 BCE. Sesame was likely one of the earliest oilseed crops cultivated specifically for pressing.
From the Indus Valley, sesame spread westward into Mesopotamia (modern Iraq), where it became the primary oil crop. Linguistic evidence supports this route: the Mesopotamian word for sesame oil, “ellu,” appears to have been borrowed alongside the crop itself from the Indian subcontinent. By the time cuneiform records were detailing Mesopotamian trade and cooking, sesame oil had become a kitchen staple across the ancient Near East.
Palm and Coconut Oil in the Tropics
In West Africa, the oil palm provided a cooking fat entirely distinct from anything in the Mediterranean or South Asian traditions. Human use of palm oil stretches back at least 5,000 years, and residues of both palm and coconut oil have been identified in earthenware artifacts from Egyptian pyramids dating to around 4000 BCE. In Ghana, the Kintampo culture was practicing intensive oil palm cultivation by 3600 to 3200 BCE, combining it with early farming of domesticated plants.
Coconut oil followed a parallel but geographically separate path. The coconut palm likely originated in Malesia, a biogeographical region spanning Southeast Asia, Indonesia, New Guinea, and the Pacific Islands. Coconut oil became a cooking staple in South India and Southeast Asia in ancient times, though pinning down an exact start date is difficult because the tropical climate breaks down organic material quickly, leaving fewer archaeological traces than the dry soils of the Mediterranean.
Sunflower and Peanut Oil in the Americas
North America had its own oilseed tradition. Native Americans began cultivating sunflowers over 4,500 years ago, using the seeds for food, medicine, dye, and paint. The high fat content of sunflower seeds made them a natural source of oil, though large-scale extraction for cooking purposes came much later, after European contact introduced pressing technology designed for olive and other Old World crops.
Peanuts, native to South America, followed a similar trajectory. Indigenous peoples consumed them as a fat-rich food long before industrial processing made peanut oil a commercial product.
The Modern Shift to Seed Oils
For most of human history, the type of oil you cooked with depended entirely on where you lived. Olive oil in the Mediterranean, sesame oil in South and West Asia, palm oil in tropical Africa, coconut oil in the Pacific, animal fats like lard and tallow in northern Europe and Central Asia. Geography dictated everything.
That changed in the late 1800s. Advances in chemistry in France and Germany made it possible to extract oil efficiently from seeds that had previously been impractical to press at scale, like cottonseed, rapeseed (canola), and soybeans. Soybean oil, for instance, may have been extracted for cooking in Manchuria and China around 1000 CE, but it didn’t become a global commodity until industrial processing arrived.
The real transformation came with hydrogenation, a process that could turn liquid vegetable oils into solid fats resembling butter. This gave birth to margarine and vegetable shortening, products that looked and tasted like animal fats but cost far less to produce. By the early 20th century, a new edible fats industry had emerged, one that would eventually make seed oils the dominant cooking fats worldwide. The cottonseed oil that was once a waste product of the American cotton industry became Crisco. Soybean oil became the default frying oil in American restaurants. Canola oil filled supermarket shelves from Canada to China.
What started as regional innovations, each culture finding the oily plant that grew best in its soil, converged into a global industry where a bottle of oil on your kitchen counter might contain seeds from three different continents, processed using chemistry that would be unrecognizable to the people who first crushed olives into stone pits on the coast of ancient Israel.