Israel 350,000 years ago and the Camp fire

a reply to: theabsolutetruth

I'm on mobile I just happened to hit reply on your post. No harm done.

a reply to: wacco

So Zionists invented the fire too LOL

Just kidding but I have a feeling Israel wants to be important a little too much

a reply to: ignorant_ape

it was just that mystery...what to do with all that left over pork, that led to the wondrous delicacies of bacon and ham. Smoked and cured meat that can be kept longer. Even without curing it, it can be smoked and dried like pemmican and kept for long periods of time. While obviously not on the menu for Levantine H. Erectus 350 KA, ham and bacon have been part of humans diets for 1000's of years. China domesticated pigs 7000 years ago and Europe followed suit 3500 or 4000 years ago. They were brought to the Americas initially by Columbus and Desoto's pigs provided the initial breeding stock for all pigs in the New World in the 16th century in part because they could be smoked and cured so that they lasted longer than many other meats. The Americas were built upon a foundation of bacon!

a reply to: wacco


according to the OP linked article.... the cave was home to Humans exclusively...

why not Neanderthals? they seemed to have moved in the European lands before humans, so why not also in the middle east/Levant

flints & other stones being exposed to campfires deep into the interior of a cave
it doesn't sound like a fire to scare off nighttime animal hunters, but possibly for heating grains or meat...but I question why flints would be put in a fire...... ? magic rituals ? because I think flint was a valuable commodity and was not knowingly made brittle or damaged by over heating in a fire (I suppose)

can anyone educate me about flint characteristics from being in a fire pit

a reply to: LostAndFound2

Not quite. The headline of the article is a little misleading. This is the oldest confirmed use of controlled fire in Israel but the oldest confirmed fire usage is from Wonderwerks cave in South Africa and predates this site by another 650,000 years. There's evidence of fire use going back to nearly 2 million years in other areas but in Wonderwerks, there is evidence of a hearth indicating controlled usage as opposed to just evidence of humans cooking their food going back 2MA. I think the big difference is that Wonderwerks is definitely from H. Erectus at 1 MA whereas the Israeli site is either Neanderthal or Archaic Humans according to the paper I read.

a reply to: St Udio

Everything else I've read on this site says Neanderthal and the dating makes me suspicious of it being related to H. Sapiens. Keep in mind too that Neanderthal, Denisovan and Erectus, being of the same Genus are often referred to as Humans or Archaic Humans. I think it's far more likely that this site would be related to Erectus, Heidelbergensis or possibly Neanderthal and much, much less likely Homo Sapiens or Homo Sapiens Sapiens due to the age of it as the earliest remains considered to be Homo Sapiens are only 195KA

Cooked food made nutrition's a lot easier to digest for the body, also... it kills lots of germs.

originally posted by: theabsolutetruth
a reply to: strongfp

I advocate cooking food and I just posted large amounts of research about it.

Can you please post something a bit more compelling? All I read was a wiki page about a book (I think your link is broken and doesn't point to

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catching_Fire:_How_Cooking_Made_Us_Human

) and a bbc article about his author. Is there anyone else corroborating this? Is there anyone that reverse the hypotesis (ie that we started cooking becase eveolution made us better at eating cooked meat)?
In any case I'd not use "large amounts of research", especially because it does seem a book, not a scientific paper and I also read on wiki:

Critics of the cooking hypothesis question whether archaeological evidence supports the view that cooking fires began long enough ago to confirm Wrangham's findings

Is it something that has been resolved and hasn't been mentioned on wiki?

originally posted by: wacco
I stumbled upon a topic made by The University of Haifa that humans in Israel made the first camp fire 350.000 years ago, and the reason was to cook food?

It doesnt make any sense, if i was a hominid, why would i cook food in a warm region,

Fire 350.000 years ago

The use of fire for cooking is something like six times older than this example.

Wonderwerk Cave

Harte

originally posted by: peter vlar
a reply to: ignorant_ape

it was just that mystery...what to do with all that left over pork, that led to the wondrous delicacies of bacon and ham. Smoked and cured meat that can be kept longer. Even without curing it, it can be smoked and dried like pemmican and kept for long periods of time. While obviously not on the menu for Levantine H. Erectus 350 KA, ham and bacon have been part of humans diets for 1000's of years. China domesticated pigs 7000 years ago and Europe followed suit 3500 or 4000 years ago. They were brought to the Americas initially by Columbus and Desoto's pigs provided the initial breeding stock for all pigs in the New World in the 16th century in part because they could be smoked and cured so that they lasted longer than many other meats. The Americas were built upon a foundation of bacon!

Peter,

Check out this paper Austin Whitall has posted on his blog.

"The Evolution of Olfactory Receptors
Kara C. Hoover
What microevolutionary factors shaped the distribution and diversity in olfactory receptor genes in modern humans? My long-term research is to reconstruct temporal and spatial patterns of variation using genetic data from modern humans. I am particularly interested in the interplay between microevolutionary forces and diet and behavior in shaping the distribution and diversity of olfactory receptor genes during the peopling of new landscapes as humans migrated out of Africa to Eurasia. A forthcoming paper is focused on signatures of selection in OR7D4, an olfactory receptor for sex pheromone detection that is also linked to human pig meat preference. The rich archaeological and genomic record of pig domestication in Asia provides the contextual frame in which I can exploit the promise of the genomics revolution through generation of an integrative anthropological dataset. My analysis of sequence data from modern humans, Altai Neandertal, and Denisova indicates that Eurasians are more likely to have a mutated copy of the gene reducing phenotypic sensitivity to androstenone and increasing preference for pig meat...."

Our sense of smell,Neanderthals, Denisovans and the peopling of America


One thing I'd like to add on the subject of the Hebrew proscription against eating pork, it can be traced to the period of wandering in the desert after the exodus. It has a practical basis, in order to kill trichinosis the meat must be cooked thoroughly, something that is hard to do in wood deficient environment such as the desert. The ban on shell fish also has its roots in the practical in many warmer climes, some shellfish harbor a toxic bacteria during the hotter months.
Here in central cal, you don't eat wild gathered mussels from july to sept.

I would think these things came about as natural circumstance.
Perhaps after a bushfire, someone tried the meat of a charred animal and thought it tasted good so there began the idea to catch it, kill it, cook it, eat it.

a reply to: peter vlar

I think it's far more likely that this site would be related to Erectus, Heidelbergensis or possibly Neanderthal

Your suspicions are 100% correct...

The Tabun Cave contains a Neanderthal-type female, dated to about 120,000 years ago

link

a reply to: glend

Occupation by HN at this site was never in question with a half million years of intermittent occupation by various humans. The point I was trying to make was the HN may have been a possible candidate behind the controlled fire making at Tabun. There is nearly a quarter million years separating the female HN in Tabun and the dates associated with the controlled fire. 350KA is on the cusp of HN separating from Heidelbergensis so it is indeed a rather iffy proposition that they in fact were creating controlled fire 350 KA but not entirely impossible. Personally, I would lean a little more heavily towards Heidelbergensis or possibly Erectus but without more information or physical remains dating to the same time period, it's kind of difficult to be certain of anything except that its one of the many members of our own Genus. It's clearly a pretty important site no matter who was creating fire here with the lengthy periods of occupation.

a reply to: peter vlar

There was an announcement in 2013 of the earliest discovery of fire for cooking by erectus dating a million years back so perhaps making fire was a no brainer for our old ancestors.

a reply to: glend

Well considering we evolved to be ground dwellers well mega-fauna still roamed the earth, it does seem to be a no brainer that we have obviously been practicing the use of fire for a very long time.

Its kind of hard to believe we were sleeping on the ground without fire to scare off all those giant predatory animals.