They came to this conclusion after studying 26 flint tools found in a quarry Evron, with the help of his new technology.
Through the development of fire, ancient people gained completely new opportunities: access to more nutrients when cooking, being active at night, heating their homes, protection from predators and much more, writes News Artnet.
But when exactly the first development of fire took place remains a dispute among scientists to this day. However, with the help of new artificial intelligence technology, scientists can now locate ancient fires and fires, piecing together the history of human evolution. a million years. And it may be one of the oldest cooking places in the world.
Filipe Natalio, an archaeologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Tel Aviv, wanted to find a way to detect the invisible traces that fire leaves, such as changes in atomic composition. Following studies that showed how bone changes when burned, Natalio realized that burned bone absorbs different wavelengths of infrared radiation differently.
He and his colleagues developed a program that reliably uses ultraviolet light to detect subtle patterns faster than a human can. The researchers used it on 26 flint tools found in the Evron quarry in northwestern Israel in the 1970s. Using a program, they were able to date the site from 800,000 to 1 million years ago.
So far, this technology cannot distinguish an accidental fire from a man-made one. But because Homo erectus (Homo erectus) built controlled fire, this discovery could help date this stage of early man more accurately than other methods currently used by archaeologists.
In this regard, the presence of tusks covered with the same sediment as some tools suggests to Natalio that this may be one one of the oldest cooking sites.
While the team warns that they cannot completely rule out wildfires at the site, the accumulation of tools and bones suggests that early hominins did build fires here.
“There are many places in the world with evidence of fire that is over 500,000 years old. It could be This is due to the fact that hominins did not make fire very often, but it may be that we are missing some points, “concluded paleoanthropologist Dennis Sandgate from Simon Fraser University.
