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We are very certain that people had fire. We just have no direct evidence for it, only indirect. Also, the ability to start fires is not necessary for having f

We are very certain that people had fire. We just have no direct evidence for it, only indirect. Also, the ability to start fires is not necessary for having fires, there is some evidence of a practice of maintaining slow-burning fires for essentially forever, letting you catch some from a wildfire and then just maintain it.

throwaway290 10mo ago
So you are saying there was no consensus that humans started making fire 50k years before this discovery and AP news just lied?
- Tuna-Fish 10mo ago
  They did not lie, you are reading things into the text that are not there. Firstly "Consensus that humans started making fire 50k years ago" is very different from "Until now, the oldest confirmed evidence ... about 50,000 years ago.". All archaeology has to contend with the reality that we have evidence of a very small fraction of the things that happened in the past, and archaeology focusing on the paleolithic doubly so. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Secondly, use of fire (which is what is needed for the scenes you quoted) and the ability to start a fire are two entirely different technologies that might be separated by a vast gulf of time. We have clear and accepted evidence of use of fire from ~1 million years ago, and fragmentary, contested evidence a million years before that. Prior to this find, we didn't have any evidence of people deliberately starting fires more than 50k years ago. These claims are not in conflict! It is entirely possible that people were maintaining fires they caught out of wildfires, for substantially longer period of time than has elapsed since we learned to start fires. Or alternatively maybe there was a method of starting fires that left no durable evidence. This is still an amazing find! But it changes a lot less about what we know about or past than a careless read of it might suggest. It certainly does not hint that human evolution was slower than we thought.
  - throwaway290 10mo ago
    You're overthinking it. TFA says > Scientists in Britain say ancient humans may have learned to make fire far earlier than previously believed If you have the same definition of believed as me you have two choices: paradigm shift (350k vs 50k) or article (or British scientists) is lying.

throwaway290 10mo ago

So you are saying there was no consensus that humans started making fire 50k years before this discovery and AP news just lied?

Tuna-Fish 10mo ago
They did not lie, you are reading things into the text that are not there. Firstly "Consensus that humans started making fire 50k years ago" is very different from "Until now, the oldest confirmed evidence ... about 50,000 years ago.". All archaeology has to contend with the reality that we have evidence of a very small fraction of the things that happened in the past, and archaeology focusing on the paleolithic doubly so. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Secondly, use of fire (which is what is needed for the scenes you quoted) and the ability to start a fire are two entirely different technologies that might be separated by a vast gulf of time. We have clear and accepted evidence of use of fire from ~1 million years ago, and fragmentary, contested evidence a million years before that. Prior to this find, we didn't have any evidence of people deliberately starting fires more than 50k years ago. These claims are not in conflict! It is entirely possible that people were maintaining fires they caught out of wildfires, for substantially longer period of time than has elapsed since we learned to start fires. Or alternatively maybe there was a method of starting fires that left no durable evidence. This is still an amazing find! But it changes a lot less about what we know about or past than a careless read of it might suggest. It certainly does not hint that human evolution was slower than we thought.
- throwaway290 10mo ago
  You're overthinking it. TFA says > Scientists in Britain say ancient humans may have learned to make fire far earlier than previously believed If you have the same definition of believed as me you have two choices: paradigm shift (350k vs 50k) or article (or British scientists) is lying.