Lexington, North Carolina is known as the Barbecue Capital of the World. October is Barbecue Month there, with a month-long Annual Barbecue Festival. The city's first barbecue restaurant opened in 1919; there are currently over 20 barbecue restaurants.
The first barbecuers may well have been prehistoric cavemen. Anthropologists say they may have started roasting meat some 1.4 million years ago.Language development didn't occur until 200,000 B.C. or later.Other sources say this originated in the Caribbean where the native Indians used wood gratings over a slow fire to cook strips of meat.
The word "barbecue" may have come from the French phrase "barbe a queue" (from whiskers to tail-The term refers to the original method in which a whole animal was cooked on a spit over an open fire), or the Taino Indian word for their method of cooking fish over a pit of coals (barbacoa). Another source says that roast mutton in Romanian translates into "barbec." So there are several accounts that vary on the true origins of the word.