Oldest evidence of the controlled use of fire to cook food
the fish were cooked roughly 780,000 years ago. Until now, the earliest evidence of cooking dates to approximately 170,000 years ago.
This made a splash in early Nov by setting the date of cooking back 600,000 years based on fish bone crystallization via cooking heat. It is decent evidence but it may have reasons other than cooking. We will see.
Neandertals possibly hibernating
A clearer case of speculation is this older report about Neandertals possibly hibernating. That sounds like a very unlikely scenario but it would be a big deal, if proven, for many reasons as they mention. Science is a social practice. Sometimes papers look like spitballs to get people talking or on board to look into a theory themselves.