Scientists excavate earliest evidence of fire use
By ANNE McILROY
SCIENCE REPORTER

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20040430/FIRE30/TPScience/

Researchers in Israel have found that early humans used fire 790,000 years ago, a discovery that helps explain how they were able to migrate to chilly northern latitudes.
The site in northern Israel where archeologists found signs that early humans used fire to cook food has been described as a crossroads between Africa, Europe and Asia. Early humans are thought to have migrated to Europe 800,000 years ago. Researchers often have speculated that they were using fire by then for comfort in cold weather, but they had no proof.
This new material indicating fire use 790,000 years ago is three times as old as previously accepted evidence. Naama Goren-Inbar, with the Jerusalem Institute of Archaeology, said it appears to confirm that early humans were sophisticated enough to exploit and control fire.
Not that the researchers found bonfires or hearths. Instead, they spent seven years sifting through thousands of tiny pieces of wood, seeds and rock in an area where there was evidence that early man had lived. They found that only a small portion of these artifacts were burnt -- evidence, they argue, they were blackened in a controlled fire, not a natural wildfire.
"The burned pieces of wood are small in size, usually black. They look identical to those that you find in a fireplace," Dr. Goren-Inbar said. His team's findings were published in today's edition of the U.S. journal Science.
The scientists found pieces of burned flint, a type of rock, in distinct clusters, suggesting that people may have had regular fires or perhaps primitive fireplaces.
They also found fruit and grains that had been cooked, evidence that the people who once lived at the site used fire to prepare food.
Other respected archeologists are calling the find significant. "I think they have made by the far the best case yet for humanly controlled fire before 250,000 years ago," Richard Klein, a researcher at Stanford University in California, says in a companion article in Science.
The site in the Hula Valley is on the shore of a lake, so the waterlogged fragments were well preserved. The team sifted through more than 50,000 pieces of wood. It found that early humans burned olive wood, as well as wild barley, wild grape and Syrian ash. They also sifted through more than 23,000 fragments of fruit and seeds.
Being able to control fire was a turning point in many ways for human ancestors, Dr. Goren-Inbar said. Fires offered warmth, light and protection from predators, and allowed early humans to test new kinds of foods. It also may have changed patterns of social interaction by providing a gathering place.
The question of when early humans first gathered around a fire has been a topic of hot debate in archeological circles. Many researchers believe the ability to light fires dates far back in the early history of our species and their ancestors. Previous finds that suggested early humans used fire have been controversial, among them evidence from a cave in China that dates back as far as 500,000 years ago. There is also evidence in Africa that dates back to more than a million years ago, but it not widely accepted. Until now, the best evidence has been hearths found in caves that were less than 25,000 years old.
The early humans who lived in the Hula Valley were not modern humans, which are thought to have evolved about 160,000 years ago.