New Scientist
Image: M. Chazan
You could call it the original baptism of fire: the moment hominins first began controlling flames. There is now evidence that moment came at least 1 million years ago, a finding that will reignite the debate over whether human anatomy was changed forever by cooking.
Fire is a tricky thing to pin down in the archaeological record. According to Michael Chazan at the University of Toronto, Canada, the oldest obvious hearths are just 400,000 years old – though the remains of burned wood, stones and food at an Israeli site suggests that hominins were using fire 790,000 years ago.
Some researchers claim that changes to early hominin anatomy hint that our forerunners began using fire to cook even earlier than this, though the evidence is hotly contested. Molars shrank and skulls grew around 1.9 million years ago, which according to Richard Wrangham at Harvard University reflects the moment that hominins developed a taste for cooked food. As this requires less chewing and digesting, the theory goes, it freed up energy to sustain a larger brain.
There is a huge discrepancy between the timing of these changes in hominin anatomy and the archaeological record of fire, says Chazan. “My heavy bias has always been that humans didn’t control fire until much later – until now.” In fact, he says, earlier evidence of fire does exist, you just have to look for it in the right way. Read more on newscientist.com…
