[Terrapreta] Stone Age Combustion: Fire use proposed at ancient Israeli site Bruce Bower

[Larry Williams]

Are the "burned grain of goat grass"  charcoal?-------Larry

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@ http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20040501/fob3.asp

Stone Age Combustion: Fire use proposed at ancient Israeli site

Bruce Bower

Our prehistoric ancestors may have been a fiery bunch. By about  
750,000 years ago, the inhabitants of a lakeshore in what is now  
northern Israel had learned to build fires in hearths, a research  
team contends.



HOT STUFF. Microscopic view of a burned grain of goat grass found at  
Stone Age location in Israel.
Goren-Inbar

For the next 100,000 years, Stone Age folk who frequented the Middle  
Eastern site used hearths for what must have been a variety of  
purposes, including staying warm, fending off predators, and cooking  
meat, according to archaeologist Naama Goren-Inbar of Hebrew  
University in Jerusalem and her colleagues.

They describe their findings in the April 30 Science.

"This is the oldest evidence for the controlled use of fire in Asia  
and Europe," Goren-Inbar says.

Goren-Inbar's team unearthed more than a dozen clusters of scorched  
flint artifacts at Gesher Benot Ya'aqov. They mark where hearths were  
located, she proposes. Investigators also found burned seeds and bits  
of charred wood near the flint remains.

These finds lay just above a layer of rock that contains evidence of  
a reversal of Earth's magnetic field that happened 790,000 years ago.  
Animal bones in the artifact-bearing soil also informed Goren-Inbar's  
age estimate.

The Israeli researcher doubts that wildfires burned the Gesher Benot  
Ya'aqov material. Such conflagrations cover large areas, but only 2  
percent of excavated flint and wood fragments show signs of fire.  
Underground wildfires, such as burning roots, don't get hot enough to  
scorch buried flint, she adds.

Fire making probably started more than 1 million years ago among  
groups of Homo erectus in Africa and possibly Asia, she says. Much  
previous debate has concerned whether burned sediment, bone, and wood  
found at several African sites dating to more than 1 million years  
ago reflect controlled use of fire. A few 100,000-to-300,000-year-old  
locations in Asia and Europe contain evidence of systematic fire use  
by people, although some of that evidence is drawing controversy (SN:  
7/11/98, p. 22).

Because of Gesher Benot Ya'aqov's pivotal age and location, the new  
report supports the view that controlled fire use began prior to 1  
million years ago in Africa and gradually spread to other continents,  
remarks archaeologist John A.J. Gowlett of the British Academy  
Centenary Research Center in Liverpool.

It's not known how the Gesher Benot Ya'aqov site's prehistoric  
residents started fires or why they would have put flint artifacts in  
fires.

Archaeologist Andrew Sillen of the University of Cape Town in South  
Africa comments that the site's inhabitants may have used the  
remnants of wildfires rather than built their own fires. Moreover, a  
rapidly moving wildfire could leave behind clusters of burned flint  
pieces, he says.

Sillen reported in 1988 that burned animal bones unearthed in a South  
African cave were probably heated in a campfire around 1 million  
years ago. However, neither that site nor any other contains a hearth  
or other direct evidence of controlled fire use, he notes.
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