The Sound Of Settled Science

Homo naledi may have lit fires in underground caves at least 236,000 years ago.

Researchers have found remnants of small fireplaces and sooty wall and ceiling smudges in passages and chambers throughout South Africa’s Rising Star cave complex, paleoanthropologist Lee Berger announced in a December 1 lecture hosted by the Carnegie Institution of Science in Washington, D.C.

“Signs of fire use are everywhere in this cave system,” said Berger, of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.

H. naledi presumably lit the blazes in the caves since remains of no other hominids have turned up there, the team says. But the researchers have yet to date the age of the fire remains. And researchers outside Berger’s group have yet to evaluate the new finds.

H. naledi fossils date to between 335,000 and 236,000 years ago (SN: 5/9/17), around the time Homo sapiens originated (SN: 6/7/17). Many researchers suspect that regular use of fire by hominids for light, warmth and cooking began roughly 400,000 years ago (SN: 4/2/12).

Such behavior has not been attributed to H. naledi before, largely because of its small brain. But it’s now clear that a brain roughly one-third the size of human brains today still enabled H. naledi to achieve control of fire, Berger contends.

51 Replies to “The Sound Of Settled Science”

      1. Well he did claim to be “the science”!!! So i figured everyone would just wait for his scientific blessing on their research

  1. Or, fire was used to herd H naledi into the back of the cave and then illuminate their hiding places before they were captured/killed/eaten.

    1. Or maybe they were friendly and showed them how to make fire…”Now piss off, I’ve got aliens to deal with.”

    2. Amusing, but if they were cooked and eaten there would be (looking for the term) a midden (?) of cooked and broken bones, right?

  2. That’s weird. Several months ago I heard him on a podcast insisting the numerous skeletal remains in the cave, which is basically a small hole in the ground connected to a vast network of even smaller tunnels, was proof positive Homo Naledi disposed of their dead which is typically a human practice…now he tells us they were down there barbecuing.
    And sure enough, scratch a “rising star” in the world of Palaeontology” and you find out his peers have a few thoughts.
    https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/lee-berger/

    Bone, wood and charcoal from the South African site should also be examined with various techniques to determine whether darkened areas resulted from burning or mineral staining, says Harvard University archaeologist Sarah Hlubik
    I’m no Indiana Jones but isn’t that something you do before making a big announcement?

  3. Butt, butt,butt wasn’t the world invented about 4500 years ago, so goes the religion that Harpo believed in!
    And yes, I have mentally deficients in my extended family who also believe that Bible thumping BS

      1. Arty
        I went to church till I was 17, I also went to a religious school for 3 years. The teacher at the school was asked if Noah’s flood water rose up over mount Everest , and she said of course. Now think about that, almost 30 thousand feet of water, and religious fools will believe that. As to Marx, he was a Marxist Joo. And I am conservative, something a bible banger will NEVER be, as belief , and conservatism do NOT mix.

        1. And I asked a random person on the street to describe Quarks … and nobody had a clue … other than they couldn’t SEE them, but still BELIEVED in them. Sorry … but just because some random Sunday School teacher … obviously a Lay person … couldn’t give you a better explanation of how the flood worked in practicality … is apropos of nothing. She certainly hasn’t seen Al Gore’s blue line inundation maps that “prove” only a small amount of Ice cap melting would destroy most all of mankind’s largest cities. Proving that Noah’s flood would only need to have been in the 2-6 ft range … to wipe out pretty much everything … Ohhhhh mommmaaaa. No … 35k feet of water covering the planet wasn’t necessary.

          And few people remain Bible literalists, who take every word of every story to be the inerrant truth. No … most SANE believers understand that the Bible was written in primitive times and used stories that could be understood and comprehended by the average man. The TRUTHS are the themes, not necessarily the literal details.

          So what you’ve done is to create a straw argument, if not a straw Sunday School teacher in a feeble attempt to discredit God’s WORD. Silly. Juvenile at its core.

          1. During the last ice age, sea level was 400 feet lower than it is today. Consider the number of human settlements that were submerged as the glaciers melted and oceans rose again.

          2. I’m somewhere between agnostic and atheistic, despite my still continuing efforts over the years. I think most atheists adopt their stance as bumper sticker intellectualism. It beats thinking and it simplifies things for them, no different than the extreme forms of fundamentalism.
            But at least religious people offer hope and a positive message.
            I do know one thing for sure: if you are absolutely sure of the universe and our place in it, you’re kidding yourself.

          3. CS … any Christian who has no doubts is a liar. OK … that’s too harsh … they’re simply pretending they don’t have any doubts. Perhaps that is why we are left with the story of “doubting Thomas” the Disciple of Christ who refused to believe in his resurrection until he could stick his fingers in the nail holes in his hands. Christ said, “OK, poke your fingers in”. We should all be testing our beliefs and orthodoxies … regularly. Science included … as Kate so wisely posts … and as Christ invites us to do.

          4. Quarks are a poor example for what you are trying to argue.

            You can’t see them, but you can see evidence of them. (Or something, I confess a low quark knowledge base.)

            You can’t see the wind either, but you can see evidence of it.

    1. Right. You’d rather hang your hat on the musings of someone who thinks he knows what happened 200,000 years ago.
      Got it.

        1. Whose religion exactly…yours?
          If skepticism is the chastity of intellect…yours is a slut.

    2. “Butt, butt,butt wasn’t the world invented about 4500 years ago, so goes the religion that Harpo believed in!”

      Who ever said that?

      Stephen Harper was a small-c Christian who belonged to a fairly mainstream Evangelical church.

    3. I don’t normally respond to you ….. but
      the scripture does not say the world is 6000 yrs old …….
      It says that modern day man was created by Yahuah 6000 yrs ago …….

  4. Some day some paleontologist will find a cow bone beside a ancient BBQ and announce to the world that cows had fire and cooked their food.

  5. Given the works of Gobekli Tepe, Yonaguni, Tiwanaku, Gunung Padang, Giza, lost city of Krishna, and many others, one can ascertain that the evolution of knowledge required to eventually construct and organize such sites would require a longer timeline than a few thousand years. Archaeology, has already dismissed pretty much every once held belief about evolution, and the timeline keeps pushing further back. I have no doubt that people controlled fire 200,000+ years ago, or the wheel for that matter. Even our knowledge of migration is all wrong, and our out of Africa theory has too many holes to float.

    1. Imagine leaving your cave after a forest fire and wandering to the edge of the burnt forest to find the charred remains of your favorite food. You’ve never eaten cooked meat before but you’re hungry. So, you dig in and develop a taste for that preparation. You put 2 and 2 together – the taste comes from putting the animal in the fire. You want that taste again – only how to make a fire. I can’t see it being an impossible step to figure out how to make a fire if you’re motivated by food. While standing around the fire you made, you realize it’s warm. Hmmm. How to get that warmth to the cave…

      1. Would like to point out that the advanced researchers of today would not think of the humans in very early times as though they had thinking feeling.
        If those were humans, they had a brain and observed the world to make sure they will survive.
        The one thing they did not have is sort of source of knowledge from the past or it was difficult, they were just starting off as it were. No history to go on. According to Darwinist magic thinking they just got separated from monkeys … heh.
        Then again it also could be that there was a lot of thinking going on until the government got their hands on things and the normal humans decide to frack it.

    2. How many generations would it take for a black, black, really black native African couple who migrated to Sweden … to produce white, blue eyed, blonde haired children? 200,000 years? Really?

      1. Not so many as you’d think. Evolutionary processes are exploitative of the environment, random mutations that might remain really rare can quickly become common, especially in small, isolated populations. We see it in dogs a lot.

        1. Dawkins’ childhood sexual abuse by a deacon colours everything he writes, unfortunately, because some of his early books do an excellent job of demonstrating just how fast a randomly mutating organism can diverge from its ancestors when there are directed pressures on it.

          Part of the problem is that human beings are really, really bad at comprehending very large numbers. 200,000 years is ~11,000 generations, if you count 18 years as a generation; and that’s probably too high given that it’s likely reproduction happened shortly after puberty for much of that time.

    3. and what do archis know anyhow.. they take that bone and weave stories and the best stories win.

  6. I read recently that primates such as orangutans, chimps etc. are showing a remarkable growth of tool use in the wild. Orangutans have actually been filmed spear fishing. It has led some scientists to suggest that these primates are moving into a new period of their existence. They go so far as to say that it is potentially the Stone Age for these primates.

    I say this, because humans appear to be regressing overall. At least, we appear (as a whole) to be getting more and more stupid. I’m sorry I’ll miss the day when a minority protected chimp gets a job over a transgender and that they will get to pay half price on flights due to not requiring the excess leg room. 😀

  7. Actually ….
    They are being sort of regenerated and occupy the buildings of western governments, hence the return to dark ages and beyond.

    1. yes .. ottawa is the perfect example..by the way, did anyone else see the pick of the elephant painting the landscape.

  8. Maybe,coulda,mighta,woulda.
    It occurs to me that one does not need a very big brain to play with fire.
    But the ‘possible soot markings’ should be backed up with some charred wood,which ought to permit carbon dating…
    As you need a very big.badly educated brain to make such speculation from so few facts.
    But driving ‘dinner’ down into the holes underground sounds much more like us.

  9. Mankind has been generating carbon emissions for 400,000 years, with no disastrous effect upon the climate.

    Ta-dum.

  10. I have sooooooo much trust in “experts” these days ………
    they are pulling these numbers out of their a$$ …..
    100’s of thousands of years?! REALLY!
    they don’t know how old this crap is!

    1. Not much of a stretch to think that a species with a smaller brain would use fire. Heck I’ve even seen a Liberal voter start a fire once.

      I don’t put a whole lot of weight into the opinions of “experts” anymore. Most of them are just sheep following the crowd and chasing a steady pay check from their masters.

      1. “Heck I’ve even seen a Liberal voter start a fire once. “

        Pics or it didn’t happen!

  11. No way of really knowing when fire was first mastered.. The gold standard of survival was not lost to any man or woman that was sentient.. All day and all night to think about how cold, damp and shitty life is living like a animal.. Did eating meat give us the spare time to invent BBQ.. Did BBQ create the need for hunters?.. Did hunting separate the clan and give them something to talk about when they returned, promoting language?..

    The riddle of humanity is the act of killing and consuming flesh (like a animal) jump started our brains somehow.. Either that or it was aliens.. Recent studies have shown animals are a lot more intelligent than we ever gave them credit for.. Could the smartest ones rub two sticks together or even their hands and notice the heat?.. Sure..

    That and nothing but spare time and a little luck or maybe even a compulsive disorder.. Think about it..

  12. “May ” have lit fires.

    Yup. And with every may have, there is a big may not have.

    The trend nowadays with TV documentary archeology is to advance initial (often silly) speculation to a virtual certainty within a one hour time frame.

    1. Not just TV archaeology. It’s very expensive to do field work, so the corpus of knowledge isn’t getting any bigger and the publish-or-perish pressures aren’t any less than other more fecund disciplines.

      Back in 1993 when I was getting my minor in Classical Studies/Ancient History, I ran into tons of papers and books written by archaeologists that started with a complete wild-assed supposition (“Akhenaton’s wife was totes a Mitanni princess, guise”) and proceeded to fill hundreds of pages based on the fact of that supposition.

      It’s wise to remain very skeptical of any claims made by any archaeologist until they’ve been confirmed by extensive forensics and peers with nothing at stake.

  13. Bigger question – how does the carbon levels in that cave compare to pre Homo naledi levels?

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