Flint artifacts show rounded pits where "pot lids" flaked off in the heat of a prehistoric fire. [Ron Shimelmitz]
Posted on 12/13/2014 6:40:04 PM PST by SunkenCiv
In layers older than roughly 350,000 years, almost none of the flints are burned. But in every layer after that, many flints show signs of exposure to fire: red or black coloration, cracking, and small round depressions where fragments known as pot lids flaked off from the stone. Wildfires are rare in caves, so the fires that burned the Tabun flints were probably controlled by ancestral humans, according to the authors. The scientists argue that the jump in the frequency of burnt flints represents the time when ancestral humans learned to control fire, either by kindling it or by keeping it burning between natural wildfires.
The findings are consistent with data from several nearby sites. On their own, these other sites provide little information about when humans mastered fire, because they represent shorter slices of time and most are not well dated. But in combination with the long, detailed record from Tabun, they suggest that ancestral humans all over the eastern Mediterranean learned to control fire around the same time, Shimelmitz says. Earlier ancestral humans may have used fire occasionally when they could find it, but because their artifacts show few signs of burning, they probably didn't use it daily...
This time frame is consistent with that of European sites. A 2011 review dated routine fire use in Europe to between 400,000 and 300,000 years ago. Together with the new study from Tabun, the data suggest that ancient humans did not master fire until hundreds of thousands of years after they expanded into cold climates. There are earlier sites with evidence of fire, but these are rare and often hard to interpret, according to Paola Villa of the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History in Boulder, a co-author of the 2011 review.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.sciencemag.org ...
Flint artifacts show rounded pits where "pot lids" flaked off in the heat of a prehistoric fire. [Ron Shimelmitz]
If one heats up the flint before knapping, one gets sharper edges.
Wow, how did they survive without it? I've always assumed they didn't migrate into cold areas until they had mastered it.
I’m sure the Pali’s will be claiming they’re the rightful owners any day now.
Love the new gif sig. It’s a development similar to the discovery of the mastery of fire. Well, maybe not.
:’) I have no idea why the “A” is in a different color scheme, but it seems to work right.
Or, perhaps those who were already using it arrived from colder areas when their population boomed due to having a *more diverse* food supply. Smoked meats are meats that can be toted along during times of low supplies, and that requires fire. Such remains wouldn’t show up in the archaeological record. Neither would footprints across the glaciers, particularly after they ceased to exist.
Study tracks global sea-levels over the last five ice ages
http://www.southampton.ac.uk/mediacentre/news/2014/sep/14_173.shtml
Of course, by the time I’d wake up from the knapp, the fire will have long gone out.
After listing the directory where those letters live, backing up the pathnames led to:
And the flint would have cooled enough to work.
No one would believe it, it sez those prehistoric humans had mastered fire.
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