[HN Gopher] Ancient human relative used fire, discoveries suggest
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Ancient human relative used fire, discoveries suggest
Author : benbreen
Score : 57 points
Date : 2022-12-06 04:18 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.washingtonpost.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.washingtonpost.com)
| groffee wrote:
| Of course they did, even birds use fire [0]
|
| [0] https://wildlife.org/australian-firehawks-use-fire-to-
| catch-...
| Phithagoras wrote:
| I'll believe it when they release geochemical data for the soot
| and plot the locations of the "hearths" on the cave map. Where is
| the published peer reviewed paper associated with this
| announcement?
|
| This discovery was made in 2013, in a cave that was believed by
| the SA caving community to be well understood. Where are the
| hearths they claim to have found? Why did nobody in the previous
| 9 years of exploration and decades of caving see this? What makes
| them certain these are not carbide dumps from humans in the last
| 50 years? [1] Or organic matter that may have fallen from roof
| cracks? Also, what has happened to the 1500 bone fragments they
| have excavated
|
| Baboons in modern times are known to navigate caves without fire
| [2], the paleoanthropology community should still consider the
| possibility that H. Naledi had no need for light to place their
| dead these caves.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbide_lamp [2]
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9letjf7ZZGA
| ProjectArcturis wrote:
| Yeah, I'm very skeptical. Just the decision to announce this by
| press release rather than peer reviewed paper suggests there
| are a lot of uncomfortable questions, similar to what you
| raised, that the authors are trying to avoid.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Berger's been taking some heat on Twitter where he announced
| this [1]. Apparently he considers a public-interest lecture
| and a publicity tour equivalent to a preprint on something
| like SSRN. Can't say I agree, but it seems to have been
| effective in getting people to talk about it.
|
| [1] https://twitter.com/LeeRberger/status/1599965297993129984
| ?s=...
| tokai wrote:
| I mean he's kind of right. A preprint is just a badly
| formatted blog post published in a pdf. Until its finished
| and published. At least if one see peer-review journal
| literature as the gold standard of scientific discourse.
| Maybe this Berger thing has more to it, but scientists can
| (and maybe even should) talk about their ongoing research
| before there is a paper behind it.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| It's not the public awareness stuff that I'm concerned
| about. That's just a necessary fact of life that I've
| also been involved with on my own digs.
|
| I'm personally simply skeptical that the research
| conditions necessary to make a Netflix special
| (premiering in May-June apparently) are also conducive to
| high quality academic work.
|
| Publishing a preprint goes partway to addressing that by
| showing everyone where their results will fit into the
| existing literature and strengthen the published paper by
| hearing / addressing public criticisms before they
| actually publish.
| singularity2001 wrote:
| Be careful, there were distinct developmental steps:
|
| opportunistically using fire
|
| keeping and transporting fire
|
| making fire, intentionally and controlled
|
| the last step may have been discovered only in the last 10-100000
| years, expert opinions diverge a lot here
| edgyquant wrote:
| No way this is true. This would mean humans domesticated
| animals and began to develop farming before (or right as) they
| discovered how to make fire.
|
| A big reason humans developed our modern brains ~35kya is
| because of them cooking food (which makes digestion on proteins
| easier on the stomach)
| hyperpape wrote:
| Are you missing a zero? Anatomically modern humans are
| significantly older than 35,000 years.
| yumraj wrote:
| > A big reason humans developed our modern brains ~35kya is
| because of them cooking food (which makes digestion on
| proteins easier on the stomach)
|
| Probably a bizarre question/thought experiment , and no way
| we'll know in our lifetime - if we start feeding cooked food
| to some animal, will it develop a larger brain?
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| No, there has to be selective pressure if we're not just
| talking about random drift. For hominids, sophisticated
| brains have been an incredibly rewarding evolutionary
| strategy despite the staggeringly expensive energetic costs
| they incur. Foraging is an intellectually demanding
| activity as we do it, so anything evolution can do from
| minimizing other expensive tissues (expensive tissue
| hypothesis) to high calorie oriented food selection to
| prosociality feeds back into improving fitness.
|
| The timeline is pretty suspect there though. 35kya is far,
| far too late for any sort of behavioral modernity as that
| term is typically used.
| chitowneats wrote:
| My guess is that it would depend on the animal. Most
| carnivore stomachs are highly optimized for digesting raw
| meat. My layman's understanding is that because humans are
| fairly balanced omnivores, we get more benefit from cooking
| meat.
| glyphosate wrote:
| The pH of human stomach acid is on par with that of many
| scavengers, such as vultures.
|
| Anthropological evidence indicates that early hominids,
| as they began their transition to a more carnivorous
| diet, were feeding on the left overs from other
| carnivorous predators - which would explain the need for
| such an extremely acidic stomach
| chitowneats wrote:
| Interesting!
| schrodinger wrote:
| Fascinating, does that mean vultures are just as
| susceptible to e.coli, salmonella, etc as we are? I
| always presumed they could handle "slightly spoiled" meat
| without food poisoning better than us.
| sonofhans wrote:
| Only if it _needed_ a larger brain to get that cooked food.
| Humans feed cooked food to ourselves, and our big brain
| helps us to discover and remember new sources of food, and
| how they need to be treated to become edible (e.g.,
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassava#Toxicity). Without
| this pressure it's hard to see how plentiful, nutritious
| food would do anything other than make the animal
| sedentary, slow, and stupid (e.g., to one degree or
| another, koalas, sloths, gorillas, modern humans).
| bena wrote:
| A lot of these things we don't have accurate timelines for
| because they're all pre-history. We find evidence of things,
| but no records.
| eloff wrote:
| Just the timeline given here is very suspect, my
| understanding is human brains were roughly the same size they
| are today 35000 years ago. Did you mean 350k?
| spanktheuser wrote:
| Has the causal and temporal relationship between cooking and
| modern brain development been firmly established? The last
| time I looked into the literature I could find (a decade
| ago), there seemed to be a tantalizing correlation but enough
| noise in the timing of cooking to place it well short of
| being an well-accepted theory. And the question of what
| constitutes a "modern brain" and when our ancestors had it
| was an even fuzzier area.
| polishdude20 wrote:
| Is this that surprising? There was certainly lava in those times.
| Lightning strikes, bushfires. Any intelligent creature would be
| aware of the phenomenon and would be able to use it.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| The surprising bit seems to be that this ancestor had a much
| less developed brain (according to the article, a brain the
| size of an orange). Besides that, the importance is that it
| further pushes back the point where our ancestors initially
| learned to harness fire.
|
| Plus, I think this might demonstrate a bit more advanced
| thinking than expected because they would've been using these
| fires to light the path into apparently fairly dangerous caves.
| Suggesting planning ability and some amount of comfort making
| and manipulating fire.
| nomel wrote:
| Seeing how unnecessarily intelligent the human brain is, for
| most environments, I would be _more_ surprised if earlier
| humans (maybe later than these) didn 't use fire than if they
| did. It's very doubtful that there was some step function in
| intelligence, to make that possible, since step functions are
| extremely rare in evolution.
| usrusr wrote:
| Lava is a very rare occurrence, the vast majority of all pairs
| of eyes that have ever lived have never seen any. And
| intelligent awareness of fire is hardly an inevitable path to
| utilization, individuals might just as well use all that to
| keep a safe distance. I guess what I'm trying to say, to my own
| surprise I might add, is that the key evolutionary requirement
| for for utilization is perhaps not so much intelligence, but a
| mating process involving a certain element of bravado.
| polishdude20 wrote:
| Over the span of thousands of years and many many of these
| beings, it only takes a few to witness lava and learn about
| it. It's like ants finding sugar. Give it time and they'll
| come across it and then the whole nest will know about it
| fairly quickly.
| [deleted]
| contingencies wrote:
| Consider fire for light vs. warmth vs. cooking vs. ritual vs.
| safety vs. hunting.
|
| One hypothesis: They lit fires to scare out bats to eat, possibly
| catching them in nets at the cave mouth. After decimating the
| population, they were forced to push deeper in to the cave
| system.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| off topic, but the title made me think of my dad with the Weber
| charcoal grill, instead of last decades of microwave for most
| everything
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