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Description
We're in Australia, like 40,000 years ago, the Pleistocene, about teatime. Dunno which territory, you Aussies can decide that.

A group of Homo sapiens sapiens gather around, hungrily.

Their men have recently felled a great wombat, Diprotodon optatum. Earlier today, having transported and butchered the quarry, they first tossed the head into naked flames to singe off the hair, then removed the blackened head once the hair was gone. Nearby, a hole was dug and filled with dry wood, and topped with stones collected from a nearby river. The pit was set a aflame, and the rocks were removed with sticks when they were red hot and placed into a pile. The Diprotodon's head was wrapped in damp bark and placed atop the hot rocks for several hours.
A man is appointed to unwrap the head. With a stone knife, he carefully carves into the wombat's face. Underneath the black charred skin, the hot, tender meat is steaming. The community(more than in view here, I hope) gather round, eager for the Diprotodon's face to be partitioned between them. They will eat well.

In his book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, primatologist Richard Wrangham talks of the Aranda people of Aboriginal Australia. Their documented method of cooking meat involved digging a pit, filling it with dry wood and laying hot rocks atop it. The pit was lit up, and the rocks were removed once they were red-hot. The rocks were laid into a pile, and on top of the pile leaves were placed. They would wrap the meat in leaves to retain its juices, and occasionally plant foods, such as roots and tubers went in with it too. Herbs and spices would be added according to taste, and the food would be cooked for a few hours, potentially overnight. The meat was laid on leafy branches, carved with a stone knife, and served.
In this case I've used damp bark instead of leaves, which was the traditional wrapping used by the Gurindji people in Kalkarindji, as mentioned in this video (though aluminium foil is now used):www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxomlf…
This is also where I got the whole burning-its-skin-first-before-cooking-to-get-rid-of-the-hair bit from.
Even hunter-gatherers don't want to eat hair in their food, and some... .... civilised people do: www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAPBm_…

As I've learned, hunter-gatherers aren't always living on a knife's edge, merely concerned with getting meat and wild plants to survive another day - they like their food to be delicious like we do. Humans didn't suddenly develop a taste for good munchies 12,000 years ago with the advent of farming. Many of our culinary preferences are rooted in our evolutionary history - e.g. hunter gatherers universally preferred their meat to be tender and almost always cooked (with a few exceptions), as this improves digestibility, and made it much easier to chew. Studies showed that wild chimps consuming raw colobus monkey meat would only eat the soft parts (intestines) if given the the choice, discarding the rest of a colobus monkey carcass when many were available, as chewing the tough muscle was energy consuming, and pieces of monkey muscle were even present in chimp faeces, undigested. Cooking gets around this.

I dunno if Diprotodon was a common food item, but this may be a special occasion, it's a dangerous quarry after all...
And I was kinda inspired by the Icelandic svið, too.

Description
We're in Australia, like 40,000 years ago, the Pleistocene, about teatime. Dunno which territory, you Aussies can decide that.

A group of Homo sapiens sapiens gather around, hungrily.

Their men have recently felled a great wombat, Diprotodon optatum. Earlier today, having transported and butchered the quarry, they first tossed the head into naked flames to singe off the hair, then removed the blackened head once the hair was gone. Nearby, a hole was dug and filled with dry wood, and topped with stones collected from a nearby river. The pit was set a aflame, and the rocks were removed with sticks when they were red hot and placed into a pile. The Diprotodon's head was wrapped in damp bark and placed atop the hot rocks for several hours.
A man is appointed to unwrap the head. With a stone knife, he carefully carves into the wombat's face. Underneath the black charred skin, the hot, tender meat is steaming. The community(more than in view here, I hope) gather round, eager for the Diprotodon's face to be partitioned between them. They will eat well.

In his book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, primatologist Richard Wrangham talks of the Aranda people of Aboriginal Australia. Their documented method of cooking meat involved digging a pit, filling it with dry wood and laying hot rocks atop it. The pit was lit up, and the rocks were removed once they were red-hot. The rocks were laid into a pile, and on top of the pile leaves were placed. They would wrap the meat in leaves to retain its juices, and occasionally plant foods, such as roots and tubers went in with it too. Herbs and spices would be added according to taste, and the food would be cooked for a few hours, potentially overnight. The meat was laid on leafy branches, carved with a stone knife, and served.
In this case I've used damp bark instead of leaves, which was the traditional wrapping used by the Gurindji people in Kalkarindji, as mentioned in this video (though aluminium foil is now used):www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxomlf…
This is also where I got the whole burning-its-skin-first-before-cooking-to-get-rid-of-the-hair bit from.
Even hunter-gatherers don't want to eat hair in their food, and some... .... civilised people do: www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAPBm_…

As I've learned, hunter-gatherers aren't always living on a knife's edge, merely concerned with getting meat and wild plants to survive another day - they like their food to be delicious like we do. Humans didn't suddenly develop a taste for good munchies 12,000 years ago with the advent of farming. Many of our culinary preferences are rooted in our evolutionary history - e.g. hunter gatherers universally preferred their meat to be tender and almost always cooked (with a few exceptions), as this improves digestibility, and made it much easier to chew. Studies showed that wild chimps consuming raw colobus monkey meat would only eat the soft parts (intestines) if given the the choice, discarding the rest of a colobus monkey carcass when many were available, as chewing the tough muscle was energy consuming, and pieces of monkey muscle were even present in chimp faeces, undigested. Cooking gets around this.

I dunno if Diprotodon was a common food item, but this may be a special occasion, it's a dangerous quarry after all...
And I was kinda inspired by the Icelandic svið, too.