ISRAEL Evidence shows early use of fire by man's ancestors

Archaeologists found flint chips, firewood and charred food in clusters.
BALTIMORE SUN
Call it the great-grandaddy of every candle, furnace and backyard grill ever invented.
Archaeologists digging on the banks of the Jordan River in northern Israel say they've found the earliest evidence outside of Africa for the controlled use of fire by our ancestors -- and perhaps the strongest such evidence anywhere.
Their discoveries, in lake sediments laid down as long as 790,000 years ago, included tool-making debris -- flint chips -- that were crazed and cracked by fire, as well as charred fruits and grains, and pieces of Syrian ash and wild olive evidently used as firewood.
The burned material was found in clusters, surrounded by other, unburned evidence of tool-making and food preparation.
"We suggest that the clustering of the burned micro-artifacts indicates the location of Acheulian [early Stone Age] hearths," the scientists report in a study published in the current issue of the journal Science.
Mastery of fire was a quintessentially human achievement that "surely led to dramatic changes in behavior connected with diet, defense and social interaction," the researchers write. In a sense, it presaged everything from Fourth-of-July barbecues to fire bombs.
Benefits of fire pits
Hearths, or fire pits, offered heat, light and a measure of protection against enemies and wild animals. They were also centers of social interaction, where generations passed down their accumulated knowledge and cultural heritage.
The process of roasting softened food, destroyed toxins, cracked the hardest nuts and released nutrients not otherwise available to our forebears. It made foods easier for the youngest and oldest to consume.
Some scientists say the advent of cooking explains why our ancestors' teeth and jaws began to get smaller 1.5 million years ago -- even as the rest of their bodies got bigger. Cooking would have reduced the need for powerful jaw muscles and large teeth that could crack and grind. A number of researchers even argue that lighter jaw muscles freed the brain to expand, although that theory remains controversial.
The Jordan River dig, at a place called Gesher Benot Ya'aqov, was led by Naama Goren-Inbar, of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. A member of her team, Nira Alperson, says many questions remain about the people who used the hearths they found.
"We cannot answer the question of whether they carried fire with them, whether they ignited it themselves or took it from natural burning," she said.
Still unsure
The scientists can't even say whether these early humans were archaic forms of our own species, Homo sapiens, or an earlier, ancestral species such as Homo erectus or Homo ergaster.
But "surely this is the earliest [evidence for the use of fire] outside of Africa, and we feel that our evidence is perhaps stronger" than the African finds, Alperson said.
Alison S. Brooks, chair of the anthropology department at George Washington University who has no ties to the Israeli dig, said that until recently the oldest acknowledged hearths -- with fire-cracked rocks and deep accumulations of black ash and wood -- were no older than 40,000 years.
More recent discoveries in France, Israel and Zambia pushed the dates for controlled fire back to 130,000 years ago.
The deposits at Gesher Benot Ya'aqov (GBY) have been known since the 1930s. The site lies on what was once the shore of a lake, now called paleo-Lake Hula. Waterlogged sediments there are 111 feet deep, and rich in paleolithic artifacts.
The two layers excavated by Goren-Inbar's team spanned occupations lasting tens of thousands of years, sometime between 690,000 and 790,000 years ago.