Earliest fire sheds light on hominids Ancient hearths unveiled
as nearly 800 millennia old. 30 April 2004 NADJA NEUMANN

You could travel back 790,000 years and still find someone
to light your fire: archaeologists have collected evidence
that early humans mastered fire much earlier than
previously thought.

There is already good evidence for hearths that are 250,000
years old, and it was widely believed that the first
controlled handling of fire occurred 400,000 to 500,000
years ago.

But an analysis of burned remains carried out by Naama
Goren-Inbar of the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, and her team
now proves that fire was tamed at least 300,000 years earlier
than that.

The researchers have spent the past 15 years unearthing and
sorting sediments at a site called Gesher Benot Ya'aqov in
Israel. The site is of particular interest to archaeologists
because it was an old crossroads between Asia and Eurasia. It
is also waterlogged, which means that any ancient remains are
extremely well conserved.

The team sorted flint and wood from the 790,000-year-old site
into burned and unburned material. They found that burned
material made up less than 2% of the total and was
concentrated at specific locations in the site, suggesting
the fires that created it were started and controlled by
early humans.

Goren-Inbar sees the study as a breakthrough in terms of
understanding the evolution of hominids: the fact that they
were using fire so early tells scientists a great deal about
their abilities and behaviour at the time.

Read the rest at Nature
http://www.nature.com/nsu/040426/040426-16.html

Comment: It is not necessary to know how to make fire, only to
understand it as a concept - that it can be harvested.
Lightening strikes provide occasional sources of fire, it is
up to the cave people to collect and store it.

Posted by Robert Karl Stonjek on this site

Thanks for such an informative post! Very interesting, especially the part about the Israeli site and how it was a crossroads between Asia and Eurasia.

The longer I'm on this WOL the more fascinating I find all the extra info, not just the food, but everything else that surrounds the era.

I just found this site on my own, should have known Hellistile would have been there first. What struck me as important is that at this point in history you still were dealing with different hominids: Homo erectus, Homo ergaster and Homo sapiens. This shows that we've evolved with fire as a tool. So, for all of those smartalecks who say, "If you're going to eat Paleolithic then you should eat raw" I say, maybe your ancestors weren't evolved enough, but mine definitely were, you homo habilis.

What I found very intersting, which could call into question some of the assumptions behind paleo diets is this quote from another site when I was confiming my hominid joke.
"Even within the last 100,000 years, the long-term trends towards smaller molars and decreased robustness can be discerned. The face, jaw and teeth of Mesolithic humans (about 10,000 years ago) are about 10% more robust than ours. Upper Paleolithic humans (about 30,000 years ago) are about 20 to 30% more robust than the modern condition in Europe and Asia. These are considered modern humans, although they are sometimes termed "primitive". Interestingly, some modern humans (aboriginal Australians) have tooth sizes more typical of archaic sapiens. The smallest tooth sizes are found in those areas where food-processing techniques have been used for the longest time. This is a probable example of natural selection which has occurred within the last 10,000 years (Brace 1983)."
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/species.html

Since I haven't read the paleo books, perhaps someone can fill me in on the basis of saying we haven't evolved since the beginnings of agriculture.

Plane Crazy
whose Germanic ancestors were probably mainly meat eaters with little grain outside of beer until around the time the Romans came. Meat good.

We have evolved but to our detriment. Our height and brain capacity has decreased.

http://www.cast.uark.edu/local/icae...eaton/eaton.htm

This is an excellent link although I do not agree with his figure that our Caveman ancestors ate only 5% saturated fat. He blames the decrease in meat consumption for decreased brain size.

Of course, I seem to remember from Phychology 101 long, long ago, Sigmund was telling us that no one has every shown a corrolation between brain size and intelligence among humans. No one, at least at the time, knew why earlier hominids had larger brains except that they were larger overall. What I found interesting is the shrinking of our molars, which, if I remember correctly, are our vegetation teeth. So why would the very teeth that needed to be used more shrink? What possible evolutionary need would have been satisfied by our having smaller molars? I grant you, we no longer needed to chew roots, but perhaps it was because the larger molars were more prone to tooth decay from the increased carb diet. Sounds like a good WAG to me.

Plane Crazy
Who's always ready to throw out a WAG, especially when he has no idea what he's talking about.

I'm not up on teeth information but there are some theories thrown around on the Weston Price Foundation website regarding teeth. Have you checked that out?

Not being a trained palaeontologist, I developed an interest in human origins about the time that "Lucy" became famous. Yes, I'm that old.

The then, and current, findings are that proto-humans split into two groups, the "Robust" and the "Gracile" versions.

The Robust mob ate mostly tough vegetarian stuff and actually developed a ridge along the top of the skull where the huge veg-chewing muscles attached. They became extinct.

Our mob, the graciles, were more carnivorous and eventually developed into modern humans, needing less robust teeth to eat the mostly (until a few thousand years ago) raw meats and fruits. Since then we have adopted staple foods such as Chicken Tikka Masala and Whopper Double Beef and Cheese which require little tooth efffort.

Actually, when chewing through a cheaper Porterhouse I wouldn't mind a bit more tooth power!

Cheers

Michael

Australia