What an odd thing for John to write: “fire was invented” – no it wasn’t.

I’m not really convinced by the temperature stuff – some natural bushfires in Australia get so hot that eucalyptus trees spontaneously combust. Finding nut shells, animal bones, etc on charcoal layers would seem like more convincing evidence of the controlled use of fire for cooking.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and this is a notoriously difficult thing to establish. The lack of evidence of fire use during early occupation of rock shelters and caves where it is found in abundance later is pretty compelling; but if they used fire outside, e.g. at the kill site, then finding the evidence for that would be extraordinarly difficult, particularly as no one is looking for it.

However, just taking their conclusions at face value, what has had me head scratching all along is why the apparent acceleration in the increase in brain size that is inferred roughly around 300,000 years ago. It would kind of make sense if that approximately coincided with the widespread systematic use of fire in Europe starting at about 400,000 years ago. That bend in the line is just a construction of course, you can fit different lines and put it in a lot of different places. Quoting Luke Jostins: “But, there does appear to be a change in the processes driving brain evolution somewhere between 200 and 400 kya.”

That’s the head-scratcher.

The other question is – what qualifies as widespread and systematic, where and by whom? The complete lack of evidence (so far) in Europe before 400,000 does seem pretty compelling – but then the recurring line I keep reading in anthropological papers all the time is “earlier than previously thought”.

It is tempting to construct various theories and scenarios around the controlled use of fire though, given that it must have been a very big game-changer.

Incidentally, there *is* very clear evidence of the increase in frequency of bushfires in Australia after human occupation that indicates systematic/deliberate burning by humans, contrary to what those authors say about evidence for this in Europe. It is one of the things that is suspected to have contributed to the extinction of megafauna in the Australian mainland after human occupation, and then again in Tasmania when it became accessible from the mainland due to drop in sea level .

IIRC, there is little evidence of habitual fire use by Asian erectus – but starting around ~200,000 ya there is such evidence in association with more modern (Mousterian-like) stone tool assemblages. This could indicate immigration of heidelbergensis-like people at the time.

johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/archaeology/lower/roebroeks-villa-fire-2011.html

http://www.uni-tuebingen.de/landingpage/newsfullview-landingpage/article/geschickte-jaeger-schon-vor-300000-jahren.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sch%C3%B6ningen_Spears

I like it.

So if we accept there was a big input to increase in human brain size about 1 million years ago that was the catalyst for evolving behaviour, then maybe you can tag that as the start of the development of modernity. And Neanderthals had fire and cooked, for a fact, as well as modern humans – the controlled use of fire pre-dates both of them, it was used by erectus.

I don’t swallow everything Greg says, but that was good sound research work.

So to me, that had to be a big step-jump advance for humans, including Neanderthals, who also cooked. The most ancient evidence for the controlled use of fire was about 1 million years ago, or possibly longer

1. Standard (albeit sincerely felt) best wishes and blessings.

2. FYI (you may find it interesting):

http://phys.org/news/2012-09-skilled-hunters-years.html

Age declared: 300,000 years. I have no way to judge the credibility of the claim.

Your F.r.

IIRC there is a long-known French Neanderthal site that shows some sort of a large fenced-in area with a substructure for living quarters and working areas.

On the flip side, my recollection of Neanderthal cave sites is that they were extremely messy. As in, the entire floor is our garbage pale.

PS: the spears were found 1994-1998 – not recently, as just wrongly reported by Science Daily and alphagalileo.org.

Use of stone tools seems like a bit of a toss-up, given that chimpanzees make and use tools, but surely the earliest evidence of the controlled use of fire and cooking of food must be taken as evidence of some ‘modern’ or enhanced cognitive ability. Maybe that was the irreversible step, or one of them, given that cooking made a lot more digestible nutrition available which could have unshackled brain size increase. It would more or less fit with the graph, if I look at it imaginatively.