Million-year-old ash hints at origins of cooking

[Elimentals]

South African cave yields earliest evidence for human use of fire.

Ash found in a South African cave hints that humans were cooking with fire one million years ago.

The discovery is the earliest evidence yet found for use of this revolutionary technology, say the researchers behind the finding. But some experts caution that more proof is needed before we conclude that humans were cooking regularly at this date.

The plant and animal ash was found thirty metres inside the Wonderwerk Cave — beyond the reach of a lightning strike.

Greatstock Photographic Library / Alamy

Francesco Berna, an archaeologist at Boston University in Massachusetts, and his colleagues found ash of burnt grass, leaves, brush and bone fragments in sediments 30 metres inside the Wonderwerk Cave in the Northern Cape province. The cave is one of the oldest known sites of human habitation, showing traces of having been lived in from almost two million years ago.

It is not possible to say for certain which species of hominin inhabited the cave one million years ago, but the team believes it was probably Homo erectus.

The bits of ash, which range from a few millimetres to a few centimetres long, are well preserved. They have jagged edges, showing that they were not burned elsewhere and blown or washed into the cave, which would have worn such edges away.

Berna and his colleagues searched the sediments for bat faeces, because large piles of rotting guano can become hot enough to ignite spontaneously. But there were no traces of such droppings.

“This left us with the conclusion that the fire had to have been created by hominins,” says Berna. The evidence is published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1.

Hot stuff

Cooking makes food easier to chew and digest, so the first humans to adopt it could get more energy from the same amount of food and spend less time foraging. But it has proved difficult to work out when humans made this leap.

Unlike stone tools, evidence of burning, such as ash and charcoal, is easily destroyed by wind and rain. And even when such remains are found, determining whether the fire was natural or human-made is tricky.

Burned materials have been found that date back to 1 million to 1.5 million years ago, at the Swartkrans site in South Africa2, and 700,000–800,000 years ago, at a site in Israel called Gesher Benot Ya`aqov3. But both these sites are in exposed spots, where lightning could have ignited the fire.

That could not have happened in the Wonderwerk Cave. But using fire and mastering it are not the same thing, cautions Wil Roebroeks, an archaeologist at Leiden University in the Netherlands.

“I think it likely that humans were using fire at this site, but I don’t think that this means these hominins were regular fire users. For a claim like that to be made, we would need to see hearths and fire places, and we do not,” he says. “If we were to discover many more fire sites at this time in history and find that natural cave fires look distinctly different, that would support an early-cooking hypothesis, but we are not there yet."

The earliest unequivocal evidence for regular human cooking dates back 400,000 years4.

Paola Villa, an archaeologist at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History in Boulder, argues that further searches are needed. “Isolated finds are not conclusive. For these arguments to stand up, the sediment layers of many different sites of the same time period need to be analysed,” she says.

Berna thinks that more evidence might be found. “The fire was only confirmed when the sediment was analysed at the microscopic level. It is possible that the reason we have not yet seen more evidence of early fire use is because we have not been using the appropriate methods,” he says.

Source Nature

Hah, no wonder South Africans are so good at Braai's. We been doing it for ages

 

[HapticSimian]

Homonin ≠ human; we've not even been around a fifth that long... but pretty cool none the less. Also, read the comments on News24's report for a headdesk-moment.

 

[Elimentals]

True but we did originate from Homonin did we not?

Anyway best comment I saw was this:

Alcohol is believed to have first been fermented sometime around 10,000 years ago.
That means approximately 990,000 years of extremely boring camp fires.

 

[HapticSimian]

True but we did originate from Homonin did we not?

Anyway best comment I saw was this:

Not to drag the thread into the realm of pedantry, but we are homonins/homonids/hominoidea. Which is to say humans are homonids, but not all homonids are humans. Just me being nitpicky.

 

[ChrisGeo]

Not to drag the thread into the realm of pedantry, but we are homonins/homonids/hominoidea. Which is to say humans are homonids, but not all homonids are humans. Just me being nitpicky.

Some more than others

 

[ponder]

bs the earth is only 6000 yrs old.

 

[Picard]

The discovery is the earliest evidence yet found for use of this revolutionary technology,

Cooking with fire isn't something revolutionary. It has been an evolutionary process.

 

[Elimentals]

Not to drag the thread into the realm of pedantry, but we are homonins/homonids/hominoidea. Which is to say humans are homonids, but not all homonids are humans. Just me being nitpicky.

I get what you saying, but I get confused when they talk about humanoids vs an actual species. Reason for being is that they have loads of fossils of human ancestors but I don't normally see if its a sub brace or just a point captured in the evolution chain. I guess part of that stems that its quite hard to know/test if its just part of a change over time or another branch.

Just like right now we just a snapshot of future humanoid:
1. We might split into say 2 or more branches in the future as one lot take to space or if one branch become a "working class" vs a "Brain Class" so we are part of the future species tree so in short we are them, but a sub class.
Vs
2. We might evolve as a group into a species that have bigger brains and large hands, looking totally different to what we do now, but with no spin off branch. We are them but not as a sub class.

Hope I worded above properly.

 

[Elimentals]

Cooking with fire isn't something revolutionary. It has been an evolutionary process.

Well it did change the way past humanoids lived, for example using it to keep warm, but I don't think this is a finding of that revolutionary process as we don't know if the knew how to make fire or simply just discovered a way to transport it. I think the true revolution as in tech was when we 1st started to make it vs finding a burning stick and keeping it "alive".

 

[jikajoe1]

Source Nature

Hah, no wonder South Africans are so good at Braai's. We been doing it for ages

lol dats wat i tot exactly when I heard dat on 702.

 

[jikajoe1]

bs the earth is only 6000 yrs old.

please take tym to ponder on your response *wink*.

 

[jikajoe1]

True but we did originate from Homonin did we not?

Anyway best comment I saw was this:

lol u such a brewery fan.

 

[Picard]

Well it did change the way past humanoids lived, for example using it to keep warm, but I don't think this is a finding of that revolutionary process as we don't know if the knew how to make fire or simply just discovered a way to transport it. I think the true revolution as in tech was when we 1st started to make it vs finding a burning stick and keeping it "alive".

Observing the technique of how to create fire is certainly a short term accomplishment.

But realising the benefits of putting meat over heat and the benefits it has for the human digestive system is something that didn't happen overnight.

 

[DigitalSoldier]

Homonin ≠ human; we've not even been around a fifth that long... but pretty cool none the less. Also, read the comments on News24's report for a headdesk-moment.

I hardly ever read news24 because of the users on that site, but decided to check the comments and after reading maybe 5 I closed the site again. I can't believe how ignorant people still are.

 

[Knyro]

Pretty interesting stuff

I hardly ever read news24 because of the users on that site, but decided to check the comments and after reading maybe 5 I closed the site again. I can't believe how ignorant people still are.

+1

Those idiots manage to inject religion/ANC/racism into ANY topic.


Looks like a few have found their way into CA as well.

 

[ponder]

please take tym to ponder on your response *wink*.

I don't need to ponder anything, it's proven that God made it 6000 yrs ago!

 

[TJ99]

I hardly ever read news24 because of the users on that site, but decided to check the comments and after reading maybe 5 I closed the site again. I can't believe how ignorant people still are.

Me neither, but more because I don't believe a word he says. Wonder how it's going in "Huston"...

Still, nice article, Elementals. Although the title is misleading, Human (Homo Sapiens Sapiens) and Homo Erectus are not the same thing as has been mentioned. Not even in the age of internet porn.

 

[Elimentals]

Although the title is misleading, Human (Homo Sapiens Sapiens) and Homo Erectus are not the same thing as has been mentioned.

Erm I did not pick it, if you click through I just copied what they posted

 

[TJ99]

Erm I did not pick it, if you click through I just copied what they posted

I did read it. I didn't mean you were misleading people, just that I didn't agree with the title, whoever chose it.