Insights into firewood use by early Middle Pleistocene hominins | Hacker News Reader

Insights into firewood use by early Middle Pleistocene hominins

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65 pointswslh25 comments

Either I missed it or the author assumed we were both on the same page: GBY seems to be a spot on a river just north of the Sea of Galilee.

GBV continues to be the band, who are due to release albums with each of these names within the next five years.

GBY is Gesher Bnot Ya'akov, an archeological site in Israel, it’s in the first paragraph of the abstract.

Yes, it did say the name and the name clearly seemed to be in Hebrew, but _where_ it actually was wasn't clear to me.

The site also has been dated to ~790,000 years old. Also was hard to find in a quick skim. So, direct evidence of the types of firewood humans have been using for the better part of a million years. Neat.

> The packed sediments were then transported to the laboratory for further sorting. A program of sediment sorting, that lasted over two decades, included the separation of different types of categories: ostracods, mollusks, reptiles, amphibians, micromammals, fish and macrobotanical remains, in addition to different types of small rocks.

Incredible. They didn’t find intact hunks of charcoal (obviously), but instead they _sorted through sediment_ to find grains which they then identified under a microscope.

Archaeology is such a cool field.

> They didn’t find intact hunks of charcoal (obviously)

Coal itself is ancient and you can find large chunks of carbonized wood (not quite coal, still retaining its original form) that are millions of years old. There is no reason charcoal could not survive intact from any point in time that humans have existed and made fires.

The whole idea of dependence on recurring natural fires always seemed suspect to me.

It shouldn't. It's been extensively documented among modern human groups.

The major question is how much our understanding from recent forager groups applies to pleistocene foragers ("ethnographic analogy"). I'm in the generally skeptical camp. Many other anthropologists aren't, particularly those in older generations.

>It's been extensively documented among modern human groups.

Do you have some sources? A quick search doesn't pull up much evidence for current hunter-gatherer dependence on natural fire regime. Or you mean anatomically modern humans?

Yes, Tasmanians are the best example that comes to mind. They had a mythology developed around lightning and subsequent fires and would then try to keep a fire going as long as possible.

Interesting, but doesn't seem to be much evidence they depended on natural occurring fire.

Here is a nice report: Fire-Making in Tasmania: Absence of Evidence Is Not Evidence of Absence , Gott 2016: https://sci-hub.su/10.1086/342430

It was personally related to me that it occurs among the northern Aché by an anthropologist who lived with them and had photos of him carrying coals.

The warlpiri and the yuqui are two other examples, along with certain andaman groups.

Tasmanians do start fires, but often prefer to carry. This is a surprisingly common practice. Starting fires is a lot of work.

> pleistocene

The Pleistocene lasts from 2.58 million years ago, maybe the first time our ancestors figured out tools, to 11,000 years ago, when we Homo sapiens had been around for ~200,000 years. Isn't that too wide a range of humans and ancestors to characterize in one group?

Are you skeptical about 11 kya ancestors doing similar things? Why?

    Isn't that too wide a range of humans and ancestors to characterize in one group?

Yes, that's one reason why I have high standards for arguments from ethnographic analogy.

    Are you skeptical about 11 kya ancestors doing similar things? Why?

Because modern forager groups have survived for centuries on the margins of colonial states. The environment they inhabit is very different from late pleistocene humans and we should default to skepticism in the absence of other evidence.

Thanks.

I'm confused, does this comment have anything to do with the paper? This paper is about fueling a fire, not starting one.

from the paper: "The consideration of fire ecology data and various factors involved in the complex process of fire ignition, combustion, and behavior, in relation to the GBY paleoenvironment and archaeology, enabled the rejection of recurrent natural fires as the responsible agent for burning (Alperson-Afil, 2012)."

But that's summarizing a paper from 2012.

When would prefer for it to have been released?

Fascinating paper, providing great evidence that our ancestors were maximizing resources hundreds of thousands of years ago.

Our ancestors have been “maximizing resources” for hundreds of millions of years, and all our living relatives alive today continue to do so.

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