300,000-Year-Old Caveman 'Campfire' Found
in Israel LiveScience.com - 3 hrs ago A newly discovered hearth full of ash and
charred bone in a cave in modern-day Israel
hints that early humans sat around fires as
early as 300,000 years ago — before Homo
sapiens arose in Africa. In and around the hearth, archaeologists say
they also found bits of stone tools that were likely used for butchering and cutting animals. The finds could shed light on a turning point in
the development of culture "in which humans first began to regularly use fire both for cooking
meat and as a focal point — a sort of campfire
— for social gatherings," said archaeologist
Ruth Shahack-Gross of the Weizmann Institute
of Science in Israel. [10 Things that Make Humans Special] "They also tell us something about the
impressive levels of social and cognitive
development of humans living some 300,000
years ago," Shahack-Gross added in a
statement. The centrally located fire pit is about 6.5 feet (2
meters) in diameter at its widest point, and its
ash layers suggest the hearth was used
repeatedly over time, according to the study,
which was detailed in the Journal of
Archaeological Science on Jan. 25. Shahack- Gross and colleagues think these features
indicate the hearth may have been used by
large groups of cave dwellers. What's more, its
position implies some planning went into
deciding where to put the fire pit, suggesting
whoever built it must have had a certain level of intelligence. Controversial cave Qesem Cave was discovered more than a
decade ago during the construction of a road
some 7 miles (11 kilometers) east of Tel Aviv.
At the site, excavators had previously
uncovered other traces of fire (scattered
deposits of ash and clumps of soil that had been heated to high temperatures) as well as
the butchered bones of big game like deer, aurochs and horse left their by the prehistoric
cave dwellers, possibly up to 400,000 years
ago. Anthropologists have debated what constitutes
the earliest evidence of controlled fire use —
and which hominin species was responsible for
it. Ash and burnt bone in Wonderwerk Cave in
South Africa suggests human ancestors used
fire at least 1 million years ago. Some researchers, meanwhile, have speculated that the teeth of Homo erectus suggest this early human was adapted to eat food cooked over a
fire by 1.9 million years ago. A study out last year in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal argued that fire-builders would have needed
some sophisticated abilities to keep their
hearths burning, such as long-term planning
(gathering firewood) and group cooperation. It's not entirely clear who was cooking at
Qesem Cave. A study published about three
years ago in the American Journal of Physical
Anthropology described teeth found in the cave
dating to between 400,000 and 200,000 years
ago. The authors speculated the teeth might have belonged to modern humans (Homo
sapiens), Neanderthals or perhaps a different
species, though they noted they couldn't draw a
solid conclusion from their evidence. Nonetheless, study researcher Avi Gopher, an
archaeologist from Tel Aviv University, said in
an interview with Nature at the time, "The best match for these teeth are those from the Skhul
and Qafzeh caves in northern Israel, which date
later [to between 80,000 and 120,000 years
ago] and which are generally thought to be
modern humans of sorts." That interpretation is at odds with the
predominant view that modern humans, the
only human species alive today, originated
about 200,000 years ago in Africa before
dispersing to other parts of the world.