We all have an ancestor. Even beef has one, called the Aurochs. It was quite large and was hunted even back then, though in different ways than today. From it, cuts of meat were obtained and then cooked by the village women. India is the first region where this ancestor appeared about 2 million years ago, then slowly reached the Middle East, Asia, Europe, and finally North Africa. The migration to the Americas happened later when European peoples chose to discover the New World. Settlements across the ocean also changed the habits of the natives, who began to eat beef and introduced animal farming. The American evolution subsequently followed the same European trend, and with it, new cooking methods were introduced, among which grilling became undoubtedly the most popular. Fast forward a few millennia, today the term beef commonly refers to cattle meat, generally a castrated male slaughtered by the fourth year of age. The ancestor, however, was phenomenally large, measuring two meters at the withers and had enormous horns: a personal defense mechanism for a wild animal at the time. With human evolution, beef also underwent changes, becoming more docile and domestic and losing many of its primitive characteristics.