Fire. Image: Lars Tinner (Flickr, used under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
Deep within the Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa an international team led by the University of Toronto and Hebrew University has identified the earliest known evidence of the use of fire by human ancestors. Microscopic traces of wood ash, alongside animal bones and stone tools, were found in a layer dated to one million years ago.
View from excavated area towards entrance of Wonderwerk Cave (Photo by R. Yates)
A long term research project
Wonderwerk is a massive cave located near the edge of the Kalahari where earlier excavations by Peter Beaumont of the McGregor Museum in Kimberley, South Africa, had uncovered an extensive record of human occupation. A research project, co-directed by U of T’s Chazan and Liora Kolska Horwitz of Hebrew University, has been doing detailed analysis of the material from Beaumont’s excavation along with renewed field work on the Wonderwerk site.
Paul Goldberg takes samples during excavations at Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa (Photo by Michael Chazen)
Evidence of an evolutionary turning point
Analysis of sediment by lead authors Francesco Berna and Paul Goldberg of Boston University revealed ashed plant remains and burned bone fragments, both of which appear to have been burned locally rather than carried into the cave by wind or water. The researchers also found extensive evidence of surface discolouration that is typical of burning which is contemporaneous with the early Acheulean occupation 1 million years ago.
“The analysis pushes the timing for the human use of fire back by 300,000 years, suggesting that human ancestors as early as Homo erectus may have begun using fire as part of their way of life,” said U of T anthropologist Michael Chazan, co-director of the project and director of U of T’s Archaeology Centre.
The ability to control fire was a crucial turning point in human evolution, but the question that needed an answer was when hominins first developed this ability and to some part this still remains. However, micromorphological and Fourier transform infrared microspectroscopy (mFTIR) analyses of sediments at the site carried out by the team has provide unambiguous evidence of the earliest use.
Micrograph of burned bone found at Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa (Photo by Michael Chazen)
Chazan comments, “The impact of cooking food is well documented, but the impact of control over fire would have touched all elements of human society. Socializing around a camp fire might actually be an essential aspect of what makes us human.”
The research was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on the 2nd April 2012.
Source: University of Toronto press release
More information:
- Francesco Berna, Paul Goldberg, Liora Kolska Horwitz, James Brink, Sharon Holt, Marion Bamford, and Michael Chazan. Microstratigraphic evidence of in situ fire in the Acheulean strata of Wonderwerk Cave, Northern Cape province, South Africa. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, April 2, 2012 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1117620109
- Archaeological Discovery: Earliest evidence of our cave-dwelling human ancestors, University of Toronto (2008)