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This conclusion does not seem to be the simplest conclusion from the evidence. Forest fires would be more rare in cold periods, but they would still occur - if
by jjk166 7y ago
This conclusion does not seem to be the simplest conclusion from the evidence. Forest fires would be more rare in cold periods, but they would still occur - if they happened 10 times less often you'd expect to see around 10% as much fire usage, not 0%. While it is possible Neanderthals in the region abruptly stopped using fire in the region for tens of thousands of years, another possibility is that they started making a different style of hearth which did not leave the same form of evidence. Perhaps they switched to making fires in different parts of or outside the cave, or perhaps they built fires on raised stones that provided better airflow but also meant buried artifacts recieved less heat, or perhaps as sediment built up in the cave they started digging pits for their hearths which would make them appear older, etc.
While none of this explicitly rules out the possibility that Neanderthals lacked the ability to make fire, that a hominin so similar to us that we could potentially crossbreed could survive in arctic climates without fire is an extraordinary claim, and absence of evidence for fire at these locations is not necessarily evidence of absence.
- londons_explore 7y agoAny skill not used for ~100 years will probably be forgotten - it's not like these people had libraries and books. In cold climates, I wouldn't expect forest fires to happen in any given location more than once per hundred years. Hence, I can totally believe that once forest fires get below a certain frequency, people lose the skill to contain it.
- snapdangle 7y agoThat is categorically untrue. Verbal cultures in Australia have kept an accurate account of a coastline that existed over 10,000 years ago. Meanwhile, the supposed collective knowledge in books is constantly second guessed and taken with grains of salt ("bronze age army sizes couldn't possibly be the size they write that they are", "the winner writes the history", etc).
- watwut 7y agoNitpick: "the winner writes the history" is an important part of studying history whether written or oral. People who write books or repeat old stories have biases, opions on how world works and open agendas. They leave out stuff they think dont matter or crosses taboos or does not make people look like as they are supposed to. Just as contemporary people lie, especially politicians and leadership, ancient civilizations discovered advantages of bending the truth or lying too. Being aware of that and being aware of point of view is important part of historical work.
- whatshisface 7y agoWhat are a few examples of when we've caught, instead of merely suspected, a lying ancient historian?
- watwut 7y agoAccording to Plato, Socrates himself defended "noble lie" as in lie that "to maintain social harmony or to advance an agenda". Besides, "ancient historians" were not historians in our sense of the word at all, so I don't understand why are you asking for historian specifically. They wrote a lot of obvious myths (falus appearing out of fire) and there is no expectation for those texts to be accurate. Ancient texts were written for purpose and with limited knowledge (just like any contemporary text) and it would be oddly naive to think anything else.
- whatshisface 7y agoI'm asking if there are any instances where an ancient author is known to have lied about something that could be believed by a modern historian if they didn't know any better. For example maybe some Sumerian committed tax fraud on clay tablets, but we caught them thousands of years later. I'm wondering if any specific examples of that are out there. Edit: to be clear, I'm asking for a specific example, not an argument that an example probably exists out there somewhere.
- kstenerud 7y agoWildfires happen all the time in cold climates. It's part of the natural forest cycle. For example, here are the fires that occurred this year in the Yukon territory: https://yukon.maps.arcgis.com/apps/MapSeries/index.html?appid=b15654d170224c19aa1b8e29a6c57dc3 https://yukon.maps.arcgis.com/apps/MapSeries/index.html?appi...
- bostonpete 7y agoAren't those mostly human-related fires? Maybe I'm not seeing everything on mobile but it looks like they're clustered around population centers (such as they are in the Yukon)...?
- gjhr 7y agoI know nothing about forest fires or the Yukon but could that just be that other fires aren't noticed because they aren't near population centers?
- agilebyte 7y agoWildfires, caused by lightning are not uniformly distributed across the same latitude or the Earth for that matter. Yukon, or North America in general, have a much higher rate of lightning strikes compared to Europe (1). https://geology.com/articles/lightning-map.shtml https://geology.com/articles/lightning-map.shtml
- jjk166 7y agoInformation would pass between neighboring tribes over time. Even if a small region had gone centuries without fire, the knowledge could return. Indeed, fire itself could be transported between tribes if one lost theirs. For a continent-scale loss of knowledge, you'd need a continent-scale loss of fire lasting generations. Any event that could cause this would certainly have left clear traces.