South African cave sediments suggest The man got up used fire almost 1.8 million years ago
Archaeologists have discovered traces of fires started 1.8 million years ago in a cave in southern Africa. THE burnt remains of owl pellets reveal that fires were regularly used by groups of the human ancestor man standing researchers report June 1 in PLoS One. The evidence pushes back the earliest known date of the first use of flame by several hundred thousand years.
Until now, the earliest evidence of the use of fire by hominids came from the same cave – Wonderwerk Cave in the Northern Cape Province of South Africa – and dated to about 1 million years ago. The new evidence comes from an older, deeper level of sediment, says Michael Chazan, an archaeologist at the University of Toronto.
The study gives a dating window for the new evidence of between 1.07 and 1.79 million years ago, but “I’m very comfortable saying it was between 1.7 and 1.8 million years ago,” says Chazan, who is leading the cave excavation.
The study used a luminescence-based method for detecting burned bones, which was already used in forensic science, but had not previously been applied in archaeology. The tiny bones that Chazan and his colleagues found were in owl pellets – indigestible balls of fur and bones that owls spit out after heavy meals with rodents.
Chazan says that the cave served as a shelter for barn owls (these albums) throughout its period of ancient human occupation, and the bones were burned when fires were lit on the pellet-strewn ground.
Archaeologists have determined that Wonderwerk Cave was inhabited by groups of H. erectus at that time. It’s unclear exactly what these fires were used for, but experts believe light, warmth, and heat were its main attractions. But archaeological evidence suggests that H. erectus couldn’t light a fire – no one knew how until about 400,000 years ago — and so they had to transport it from wildfire sites, Chazan says. “This is not a question of human lighting of fire; it’s lighting a fire in the landscape.
One of the conclusions of the study is that the first fires in the Wonderwerk cave were only occasional. “There is a clear signal, but it is not year-round access to fire,” Chazan explains. It is likely that wildfires only occurred during warm seasons and were therefore too unpredictable to rely on lasting changes to our way of life.
