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Cooking allowed a significant increase in meat consumption and calorie intake. It was soon discovered that meat could also be dried and smoked by fire, preserving it for lean seasons. Fire was even used in manufacturing tools for hunting and butchering. Hominids also learned that starting brush fires to burn large areas could increase land fertility and clear terrain to make hunting easier. Evidence shows that early hominids were able to corral and trap prey animals by means of fire. Fire was used to clear out caves prior to living in them, helping to begin the use of shelter.
Everywhere you look, in this modern world, you see the works of Man. Homo sapiens sapiens, our species, has been a prolific creator, a builder, a shaper, a creature unparalleled in changing its environment to suit itself. Fires may have made humans more social by giving them a place to gather around.
Eating Meat Allowed Humans to Conquer Globe, Scientists Say
Archaeologists examined the available data for European sites and concluded that habitual use of fire wasn't part of the suite of human behaviors until about 300,000 to 400,000 years ago. They believe that the earlier sites are representative of the opportunistic use of natural fires. The earliest evidence for controlled use of fire outside of Africa is at the Lower Paleolithic site of Gesher Benot Ya'aqov in Israel, where charred wood and seeds were recovered from a site dated 790,000 years old. Other evidence has been found at Zhoukoudian, a Lower Paleolithic site in China, Beeches Pit in the U.K., and Qesem Cave in Israel. Homo erectus used fire for warmth, cooking, light, heat, and to purify water.
Its brain was up to twice the size of its predecessor’s, its teeth were much smaller, and its body was quite similar to ours. "Our direct human ancestor Homo erectus is older than we thought". The extant Homo heidelbergensis , which was originally African, emerged within the Asian Homo erectus.
Evolution
Museum science is helping to answer where, when and how humans evolved. Erectus discovery, the find that has revealed most about this species is Turkana Boy. Most ideas concentrate on its role as a feature that strengthened the skull or helped dissipate forces passing through the skull. Researchers have recently indicated the latter was unlikely, instead speculating that it may have had a role in social signalling between archaic human individuals, enhancing friendly or aggressive facial expressions.
Cretinism can reduce brain size by 50%,32, and this could be an explanation for some specimens’ low cranial capacity. There is little doubt that these specimens did not show signs of disease and that there was a large natural variation in cranial function. The size and cranial capacities of Homo erectus, Neandertals, and Homo heidelbergensis are unknown. The presence of a large brain mass does not imply that intelligence is ‘normal.’ Daniel Lyon, a man of low stature (height of 1.55 m, weight 65.1 kg), had a brain weighing 680 grams and measuring 1.55 m in height and 65.1 kg in weight. It is clear from these scholars’ description that Layer 10 is thick and has a long and very complicated depositional history and that the site might have been open to varying extents throughout most of the period of its formation.
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Erectus generally avoided areas with high carnivore density. It is possible that male–male bonding and male–female friendships were important societal aspects. ; meaning "upright man") is an extinct species of archaic human from the Pleistocene, with its earliest occurrence about 2 million years ago.
Scientists have found the remains of fish, land animals, and vegetables, as well as stone tools. Using those artifacts as a reference, they suspect there was a large group of early hominids living at the edge of the lake. Until the Wonderwerk Cave find, Gesher Benot Ya’aqov, a lakeside site in Israel, was considered to have the oldest generally accepted evidence of human-controlled fire.
Future excavations and research conducted at Layers 8–9 and 10 may reveal similar evidence to definitively resolve this continuing controversy. A large pile of limestone breccia of various sizes was encountered on top of Layer 4 sediments in the northern part of the excavation pit. Erin Wayman is a science and human evolution blogger for Hominid Hunting. She has M.As in biological anthropology and science writing.
Berna’s team thinks the problem might be in how archaeologists have been looking for fire. The new research involved examining the cave sediments, bones and plant ash at a microscopic level, which revealed information that’s normally overlooked. Perhaps with the help of such microscopic methods, anthropologists will find that the origin of fire is indeed linked to the origin of Homo erectus. If the history of fire extends back one million years, why don’t archaeologists find more evidence of it?
At Koobi Fora and Chesowanja, both in Kenya, small patches of reddened soil were found in areas containing stone tools up to 1.5 million years old. To try to prove that Early Stone Age campfires caused the discoloration, researchers in the 1980s and ’90s used techniques such as magnetic susceptibility analysis and thermoluminescence dating. The first tool detects burned earth by gauging fluctuations in its magnetic field; the second determines how long ago an object was heated by measuring the photons it emits when baked in a lab.
In 1985, biological anthropologist Gail Kennedy argued for resorption as a result of hyperparathyroidism caused by hypocalcemia , a consequence of a dietary shift to low-calcium meat. Kennedy could not explain why the calcium metabolism of H. Fire also allowed major innovations in tool and weapon manufacture.
Most of the fine-grained sediments in the site were water laid, and even if ash remains could be recognized, it would be difficult to demonstrate where they were produced. The co-occurrence of burned black bones and quartzite artifacts in the same layers is only suggestive of a cultural association, and hence of the use of fire by humans, but does not prove it. Their principal interest was looking for evidence of in situ use of fire. During the cleaning of geological sections, they collected 42 large-animal and 278 microfaunal elements mainly from the upper part of Layer 10 (Weiner et al. 1998). Five of the macrofaunal bone fragments were uniformly black to gray in color in fresh fracture surfaces. Infrared spectra showed that the insoluble residues extracted from the blackened bones were all characteristic of burned bone organic matrix.
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