Paleo Diet: Raw Paleo Diet and Lifestyle Forum
Raw Paleo Diet Forums => Hot Topics => Topic started by: PaleoPhil on April 02, 2012, 10:00:53 am
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Lower Paleolithic Controlled Use of Fire? Not so much
By K. Kris Hirst, About.com Guide March 16, 2011
http://archaeology.about.com/b/2011/03/16/lower-paleolithic-controlled-use-of-fire-not-so-much.htm (http://archaeology.about.com/b/2011/03/16/lower-paleolithic-controlled-use-of-fire-not-so-much.htm)
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Roebroeks and Villa don't argue that the evidence for very early use of fire doesn't exist--at sites such as Gesher Benot Ya'aqov (780,000 bp) and (possibly) Zhoukoudian--but that the use was opportunistic rather than controlled (that is, prehistoric residents couldn't start their own fire from scratch).
Roebroeks and Villa point out the large number of Middle Paleolithic open-air sites in cold climatic areas where people might have needed fire to stay warm but do not include evidence of it at all. They don't dismiss evidence of heat-treated stone tools or charred bones from African sites such as Chesowanja (Kenya) and Koobi Fora FxJj20 (Tanzania), some as early as 1.6 million years ago. Instead, they argue that hominids such as Homo erectus did not have controlled use of fire, but used it when they ran into it--closer to the equator where lightning strikes and thus natural fires would have been more common."
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All those sites such as Gesher and Zhoukoudian have already been debunked due to a serious lack of evidence, and a strong possibility that evidence from more recent eras was intermixed therein.
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Sure. It seems like people are so willing to believe the super-ancient cooking hypothesis that the more evidence we pile on, the better.
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The original article in Proceedings of the National Academies of Science is open-access and is available here for those who are interested: http://www.pnas.org/content/108/13/5209.full.pdf+html (http://www.pnas.org/content/108/13/5209.full.pdf+html)