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Insights into firewood use by early Middle Pleistocene hominins
- tclancy 6mo agoEither 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.
- showerst 6mo agoGBY is Gesher Bnot Ya'akov, an archeological site in Israel, it’s in the first paragraph of the abstract.
- tclancy 6mo agoYes, it did say the name and the name clearly seemed to be in Hebrew, but _where_ it actually was wasn't clear to me.
- _alternator_ 6mo agoThe 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.
- SummSolutions 6mo agoFascinating paper, providing great evidence that our ancestors were maximizing resources hundreds of thousands of years ago.
- frutiger 6mo agoOur ancestors have been “maximizing resources” for hundreds of millions of years, and all our living relatives alive today continue to do so.
- thunkle 6mo agoThere was a problem providing the content you requested
- WolfCop 6mo agoBad bot
- ftkftk 6mo agoI have the same issue with a Boox eink tablet. I`m pretty sure I`m not a bot.
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 6mo agoBut how can you be sure, really?
- l4tq3 6mo ago[dead]
- kid64 6mo agoThe whole idea of dependence on recurring natural fires always seemed suspect to me.
- AlotOfReading 6mo agoIt 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.
- sriacha 6mo ago>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?
- trollbridge 6mo agoYes, 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.
- sriacha 6mo agoInteresting, 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 https://sci-hub.su/10.1086/342430
- AlotOfReading 6mo agoIt 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.
- onlyjanand 6mo ago[dead]
- joenot443 6mo ago> 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.
- teruakohatu 6mo ago> 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.