[HN Gopher] Insights into firewood use by early Middle Pleistoce...
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Insights into firewood use by early Middle Pleistocene hominins
Author : wslh
Score : 50 points
Date : 2026-04-22 20:42 UTC (3 days ago)
HTML web link (www.sciencedirect.com)
TEXT w3m dump (www.sciencedirect.com)
| tclancy wrote:
| Either I missed it or the author assumed we were both on the same
| page: GBY seems to be a spot on a river just north of the Sea of
| Galilee.
|
| GBV continues to be the band, who are due to release albums with
| each of these names within the next five years.
| showerst wrote:
| GBY is Gesher Bnot Ya'akov, an archeological site in Israel,
| it's in the first paragraph of the abstract.
| tclancy wrote:
| Yes, it did say the name and the name clearly seemed to be in
| Hebrew, but _where_ it actually was wasn't clear to me.
| _alternator_ wrote:
| The site also has been dated to ~790,000 years old. Also was
| hard to find in a quick skim. So, direct evidence of the types
| of firewood humans have been using for the better part of a
| million years. Neat.
| SummSolutions wrote:
| Fascinating paper, providing great evidence that our ancestors
| were maximizing resources hundreds of thousands of years ago.
| frutiger wrote:
| Our ancestors have been "maximizing resources" for hundreds of
| millions of years, and all our living relatives alive today
| continue to do so.
| thunkle wrote:
| There was a problem providing the content you requested
| WolfCop wrote:
| Bad bot
| ftkftk wrote:
| I have the same issue with a Boox eink tablet. I`m pretty
| sure I`m not a bot.
| kQq9oHeAz6wLLS wrote:
| But how can you be sure, really?
| kid64 wrote:
| The whole idea of dependence on recurring natural fires always
| seemed suspect to me.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| It shouldn't. It's been extensively documented among modern
| human groups.
|
| The major question is how much our understanding from recent
| forager groups applies to pleistocene foragers ("ethnographic
| analogy"). I'm in the generally skeptical camp. Many other
| anthropologists aren't, particularly those in older
| generations.
| sriacha wrote:
| >It's been extensively documented among modern human groups.
|
| Do you have some sources? A quick search doesn't pull up much
| evidence for current hunter-gatherer dependence on natural
| fire regime. Or you mean anatomically modern humans?
| trollbridge wrote:
| Yes, Tasmanians are the best example that comes to mind.
| They had a mythology developed around lightning and
| subsequent fires and would then try to keep a fire going as
| long as possible.
| sriacha wrote:
| Interesting, but doesn't seem to be much evidence they
| depended on natural occurring fire.
|
| Here is a nice report: Fire-Making in Tasmania: Absence
| of Evidence Is Not Evidence of Absence , Gott 2016:
| https://sci-hub.su/10.1086/342430
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| It was personally related to me that it occurs among the
| northern Ache by an anthropologist who lived with them and
| had photos of him carrying coals.
|
| The warlpiri and the yuqui are two other examples, along
| with certain andaman groups.
|
| Tasmanians _do_ start fires, but often prefer to carry.
| This is a surprisingly common practice. Starting fires is a
| lot of work.
| mmooss wrote:
| > pleistocene
|
| The Pleistocene lasts from 2.58 million years ago, maybe the
| first time our ancestors figured out tools, to 11,000 years
| ago, when we Homo sapiens had been around for ~200,000 years.
| Isn't that too wide a range of humans and ancestors to
| characterize in one group?
|
| Are you skeptical about 11 kya ancestors doing similar
| things? Why?
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Isn't that too wide a range of humans and ancestors to
| characterize in one group?
|
| Yes, that's one reason why I have high standards for
| arguments from ethnographic analogy. Are
| you skeptical about 11 kya ancestors doing similar things?
| Why?
|
| Because modern forager groups have survived for centuries
| on the margins of colonial states. The environment they
| inhabit is very different from late pleistocene humans and
| we should default to skepticism in the absence of other
| evidence.
| LeCompteSftware wrote:
| I'm confused, does this comment have anything to do with the
| paper? This paper is about fueling a fire, not starting one.
| sriacha wrote:
| from the paper: "The consideration of fire ecology data and
| various factors involved in the complex process of fire
| ignition, combustion, and behavior, in relation to the GBY
| paleoenvironment and archaeology, enabled the rejection of
| recurrent natural fires as the responsible agent for burning
| (Alperson-Afil, 2012)."
| LeCompteSftware wrote:
| But that's summarizing a paper from 2012.
| joenot443 wrote:
| > The packed sediments were then transported to the laboratory
| for further sorting. A program of sediment sorting, that lasted
| over two decades, included the separation of different types of
| categories: ostracods, mollusks, reptiles, amphibians,
| micromammals, fish and macrobotanical remains, in addition to
| different types of small rocks.
|
| Incredible. They didn't find intact hunks of charcoal
| (obviously), but instead they _sorted through sediment_ to find
| grains which they then identified under a microscope.
|
| Archaeology is such a cool field.
| teruakohatu wrote:
| > They didn't find intact hunks of charcoal (obviously)
|
| Coal itself is ancient and you can find large chunks of
| carbonized wood (not quite coal, still retaining its original
| form) that are millions of years old. There is no reason
| charcoal could not survive intact from any point in time that
| humans have existed and made fires.
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