? Total Recall (2012) - Official Trailer | Main | Leela ?
April 04, 2012
Now we're cooking with fire
Remains of ash and bone fragments found 30m inside the entrance of Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa suggests early humans were cooking with fire one million years ago.
The ability to use fire is regarded as a key step in human development because it gave us access to cooked foods and new technologies.
Stone tools found at Wonderwerk Cave indicate the ancestor in question may have been Homo erectus, a species whose existence has been documented as far back as 1.8 million years ago.
Stone tools found at Wonderwerk Cave indicate the ancestor in question may have been Homo erectus, a species whose existence has been documented as far back as 1.8 million years ago.
The discovery may support Richard Wrangham's "cooking hypothesis" viz the invention of cooking split the ancestors of humans from those of modern gorillas and chimpanzees.
Cooking allowed our ancestors to develop bigger brains and, in his hypothesis, is the key reason modern humans emerged. The controlled use of fire, according to Wrangham, was a more important milestone in human evolution than the invention of agriculture or eating meat.
Posted by Ghost of a flea at April 4, 2012 07:27 AM