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Photo: Ron Shimelmitz
Artifacts used in study at Tabun Cave
Photo: Ron Shimelmitz

Israeli cave may prove when humans began using fire

According to new Israeli study conducted at Tabun Cave in north, humans began routinely using fire about 350,000 years ago - much later than other studies suggest.

A new Israeli study, conducted in the Tabun Cave in northern Israel, has revealed that humans began routinely using fire about 350,000 years ago - helping to pin down one of the most important developments in human history which has had hazy findings up until now.

 

 

According to Science Magazine, the study, which looked at artifacts from the Tabun Cave, about 24 kilometers south of Haifa, examined flint tools, used for cutting and scraping, and flint debris, to help determine when exactly the usage of fire by humans began.

 

The cave documents 500,000 years of human history, enabling researchers to see a change in behavior patterns over a long span of time.

 

"Tabun cave is unique in that it's a site with a very long sequence," Ron Shimelmitz, an archealogoist at the University of Haifa and co-author of the newly released study, told Science Magazine.

 

"We could examine step by step how the use of fire changed in the cave," said Shimelmitz.

  

The artifacts used to determine when humans began using fire (Photo: Ron Shimelmitz) (Photo: Ron Shimelmitz)
The artifacts used to determine when humans began using fire (Photo: Ron Shimelmitz)

 

To understand when the use of fire became an integral part of the lives of ancestral humans, the researchers examined flints from about 100 layers of sediment in the lowermost 16 meters of the cave deposits.

 

In layers older than 350,000 years, nearly none of the flints showed signs of being burned. However, in every layer afterwards, several flints showed signs of being exposed to fire. Researchers began seeing red or black coloration, cracking, and small round depressions where fragments (known as pot lids) flaked off from the stone.

 

As wildfires are uncommon in caves, the researchers determined that the findings must point to fires controlled by ancestral humans.

 

Furthermore, the increasing frequency of the burnt flints seemed to point to the time when the ancestral humans learned to control fire, by either kindling it or by maintaining fire from wildfires that occurred naturally.

 

The new findings made by the Israeli researchers were also consistent with data collected from several nearby archeological sites. Studied individually, the other sites did not provide much information about when humans began to master fire because they did not represent a massive time span like that of the Tabun Cave, or were not well dated.

 

Therefore, the long, detailed record of the Tabun Cave helps give the findings more context.

 

The findings from the research conducted at the Tabun Cave suggest that ancestral humans along the eastern Mediterranean began to learn how to control fire at around the same point in time, said Shimelmitz.

 

While earlier ancestral humans may have used fire from time to time, they most likely did not use it daily, the researchers revealed in the December issue of the Journal of Human Evolution.

 

The time frame established by the researchers is also consistent with findings at European archeological sites, according to Science Magazine.

 

In 2011, researchers dated the routine use of fire to between 400,000 and 300,000 years ago. Along with the new research from the Tabun Cave, data suggests that ancient humans did not master fire until hundreds of thousands of years after they spread out into colder climates.

 

Earlier sites have shown evidence of fire use but they are rare and difficult to interpret, according to Paola Villa, a co-author of the 2011 study and researcher at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History.

 

Thus, the new Israeli study may not end the debate about when exactly humans began routinely using fire.

 

Richard Wrangham of Harvard University thinks that human ancestors mastered fire much earlier than 350,000 years ago. Wrangham argues that humans started cooking food about 2 million years ago and credits fire for beginning the evolution of larger brains – all of which happened long before the burnt flints were dated in the Tabun Cave.

 

Wrangham still calls the Israeli findings "exciting" but he is not convinced by the historical sequence of the Israeli archeological site, Science Magazine reported.

 

According to Wrangham, the Tabun Cave may have been used to gather materials or butcher animals while cooking may have been saved for open-air sites. "We clearly need more information," said Wrangham.

 

Yet, both Wrangham and Shimelmitz agree that no matter when fire began being used by humans routinely, it gave humans major advantages such as cooking, warmth, light, and safety from predators.

 

The seemingly miraculous gifts fire gave to humans led Shimelmitz to determine that "there's a reason people think we got fire from the gods."

 


פרסום ראשון: 12.13.14, 18:45
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