Ancient humans used fire for cooking.
REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, JAKARTA — About a million years ago, people used fire from natural sources such as lightning strikes. However, it is difficult to find concrete evidence of the use of fire that was started by humans long ago.
New use of artificial intelligence (AI) searches for evidence of controlled burns by primordial man described in publications published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in June 2022 by a team of Israeli scientists and Canadian colleagues.
They concentrated on stone tools found at Evron Quarry, an Israeli archaeological site in the Mediterranean Sea that was excavated extensively in the 1970s.
New research reveals that between 1 and 0.8 million years ago, early humans living at this site did use controlled fire to cook food and manufacture tools.
The researchers used artificial intelligence to find variations in the structure of tiny atoms in the prehistoric rock they found at Evron Quarry. These stones may have been used in several campfire first ever found.
The story of taming fire
Scientists are trying to find a way to find evidence of fire in artifacts that don’t have obvious burn marks.
“This reveals that fire in the Lower Paleolithic had no signs of pyrotechnics (controlled fire in ancient times). And added a new Lower Paleolithic site to several archaeological sites with evidence linking hominid artifacts and the resulting fire,” the authors said. Earth Sky.
This implies that using artificial intelligence as a tool could help us discover more about our distant ancestors.
The research team hopes that other researchers will adopt their methodology and look at both locations, where early humans may have lived and perhaps left further undiscovered clues to their early mastery of fire.
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