Maîtrise du feu au paléolithique

 

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Evidence for the cooking of fish 780,000 years ago at Gesher BenotYa’aqov, Israel [Abstract]
Zohar et al.
Nature Ecology & Evolution, 2022

Size–strain analysis using X-ray powder diffraction provided evidence that these teeth had been exposed to low temperature (<500 °C), suggesting, together with the archaeological and taphonomic data, that the fish from the archaeological horizons of Area B had been cooked and consumed on site. This is the earliest evidence of cooking by hominins.

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Establishing patterns of early fire use in human evolution [PDF]
Roebroeks et al.
In S. Gaudzinski-Windheuser (Ed.), The Beef behind Al
Possible Pasts, The Tandem Festschrift in Honour of Elaine Turner and Martin Street, 2021

Our review indicates that fire use was very probably a standard partof the hominin technological repertoire from the second half of the Middle Pleistocene onward. […] The strong signal for fire use since ~ 400 ka does not imply that there was no fire use before that period, even if some of the early contested cases may indeed be the result of natural fires. As mentioned above, hominins were distributed over large parts of the Old World from around 2 Ma onward and were probably occasionally exposed to settings that are quite challenging in terms of thermoregulation and diet for present-day humans in our current interglacial, such as the loess plateau of Central China

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Middle Pleistocene fire use: The first signal of widespread cultural diffusion in human evolution [Texte et PDF]
MacDonald et al.
PNAS, 2021

These archaeological data, as well as studies of ancient genomes, lead us to hypothesize that at the latest by 400,000 y ago, hominin subpopulations encountered one another often enough and were sufficiently tolerant toward one another to transmit ideas and techniques over large regions within relatively short time periods. Furthermore, it is likely that the large-scale social networks necessary to transmit complicated skills were also in place. Most importantly, this suggests a form of cultural behavior significantly more similar to that of extant Homo sapiens than to our great ape relatives.

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The Uncertain Origins of Fire-Making by Humans: The State of the Art and Smouldering Questions [PDF]
Andrew C. Sorensen
Mitteilungen der Gesellschaft für Urgeschichte, 2019

it appears stone-on-stone percussive fire-making using flint and pyrite was a skill first practiced by at least some groups of late Neanderthals, though its origins could be much older. Conversely, preservational problems associated with the wood-on-wood friction fire-making make it extremely difficult to assess the antiquity of this method. Lingering questions regarding early fire-making innovations and possible avenues for future research are discussed

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Towards an understanding of the costs of fire [PDF]
Amanda G. Henry et al.
Quaternary international, 2018

Here we discuss in detail the various kinds of costs associated with fire and how these costs could, and do, structure human fire-use behavior. We then describe a small experiment to ‘put some numbers on’ the potential costs of fire, by quantifying one of the most expensive costs (fuel collection) and comparing it to one of the most-praised benefits (cooking of food). The results suggest that the costs of fuel collection are very high in less-forested environments, and that excessively large amounts of cooked foods are needed to match the total costs of fuel collection and the act of cooking. Overall, the costs of fire can be quite high and must be considered when proposing models for pre-modern human adoption and regular use of fire technologies.

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Toward a Long Prehistory of Fire [Texte]
Michael Chazan
Current Anthropology, 2017

I propose a potential scenario for the prehistory of fire, consisting of three major stages of development. From this perspective, obligate cooking developed gradually in the course of human evolution, with full obligate cooking emerging subsequent to modern humans rather than synchronous with the appearance of Homo erectus as envisioned by the cooking hypothesis.

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Our findings reveal that a functionally significant change in the AHR occurred uniquely in humans, relative to other primates, that would attenuate the response to many environmental pollutants, including chemicals present in smoke from fire use during cooking.

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The plant component of an Acheulian diet at Gesher Benot Ya‘aqov, Israel [Texte]
Melamed et al.
PNAS, 2016

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When did humans learn to boil ? [PDF]
John D. Speth
PaleoAnthropology, 2015

Obviously, this evidence does not prove that Neanderthals, or earlier hominins, were in fact wet-cooking but, given the simplicity of the technology and the wide availability of suitable container materials, it seems highly likely. Scholars interested in the evolution of human diet and culinary technology need to be aware of this likelihood, and begin to focus their collective efforts on finding innovative ways to “see” wet-cooking in the Paleolithic record.

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Here, we argue that plant carbohydrates and meat were both necessary and complementary dietary components in hominin evolution.[…] Although the timing of widespread cooking is not known, Wrangham and Conklin-Brittain (2003) argue that it was long enough ago to allow for biological adaptations to take place, including changes in digestive anatomy around 1.8 million years ago, reduction in tooth size, and reduced capacity for digestion of raw, fibrous foods. They further propose that cooked foods were soft enough to be palatable by infants, potentially leading to earlier weaning and shorter interbirth intervals (also see Carmody et al. 2011)

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Earliest fire in Africa: towards the convergence of archaeological evidence and the cooking hypothesis [PDF]
Gowlett & Wrangham
Azania : archeological research in Africa, 2013

Interpretations often struggle to take into account the implications of a huge bias in archaeological preservation, which means that our surviving evidence does not accurately map the past. Additionally, there is often a‘yes-no’ presence/absence approach to fire, which does not recognise that earliest hominin fire use may have occurred in interaction with natural fire, and may not even have included deliberate hearth use in its first stages. Here we examine the need to integrate different approaches to the issues of early fire-use, considering especially the earliest archaeological evidence and the ‘cooking hypothesis’, while also tackling the issues of apparent differences in early African and European fire records.

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Microstratigraphic evidence of in situ fire in the Acheulean strata of Wonderwerk Cave, Northern Cape province, South Africa [Texte]
Berna et al.
PNAS, 2012

The ability to control fire was a crucial turning point in human evolution, but the question when hominins first developed this ability still remains. Here we show that micromorphological and Fourier transform infrared microspectroscopy (mFTIR) analyses of intact sediments at the site of Wonderwerk Cave, Northern Cape province, South Africa, provide unambiguous evidence—in the form of burned bone and ashed plant remains—that burning took place in the cave during the early Acheulean occupation, approximately 1.0 Ma. To the best of our knowledge, this is the earliest secure evidence for burning in an archaeological context.

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On the earliest evidence for habitual use of fire in Europe [Texte]
Roebroeks & Villa
PNAS, 2011

The timing of the human control of fire is a hotly debated issue, with claims for regular fire use by early hominins in Africa at ∼1.6 million y ago. These claims are not uncontested, but most archaeologists would agree that the colonization of areas outside Africa, especially of regions such as Europe where temperatures at time dropped below freezing, was indeed tied to the use of fire. Our review of the European evidence suggests that early hominins moved into northern latitudes without the habitual use of fire. It was only much later, from ∼300,000 to 400,000 y ago onward, that fire became a significant part of the hominin technological repertoire. It is also from the second half of the Middle Pleistocene onward that we can observe spectacular cases of Neandertal pyrotechnological knowledge in the production of hafting materials. The increase in the number of sites with good evidence of fire throughout the Late Pleistocene shows that European Neandertals had fire management not unlike that documented for Upper Paleolithic groups.

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Timing of the appearance of habitual fire use
Sandgathe et al.
PNAS, 2011

We agree that the evidence indicates that fire was not a requisite technology that allowed Early Pleistocene hominins to expand into more northerly latitudes. However, we argue that the available evidence better supports a significantly later appearance for the habitual use of fire (sometime near the end of the Late Pleistocene) and that before this fire (sic), use was always sporadic and opportunistic. Roebroeks and Villa (1) supported their argument by showing, in figure 1 and table 1 in ref. 1, significant increases in the numbers of sites with good evidence for fire in the more recent Marine Isotope Stages (MIS), and they adjusted these data to show numbers of sites with good evidence for fire per 10,000-y increment within each MIS. A potential problem with these data is that they may simply be reflecting the overall frequency of sites per time pe-riod. We can expect that, because of ongoing taphonomic pro-cesses, there will necessarily be fewer sites the farther back intime we look. It would be more meaningful if we look at the number of site occupations with good evidence for fire relative to the total number of site occupations known for that specific time period.

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