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RIA Novosti. Scientists conducted a comparative analysis of the appearance of signs of fire breeding at the sites of ancient man and found out that almost everywhere it happened about 400 thousand years ago-much earlier than previously thought. In addition, the authors argue that our ancestors already had a system of communication and knowledge transfer by this time, otherwise it is impossible to explain the speed of the spread of a new key skill over a huge territory.

Archaeologists from the University of Leiden and the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, after analyzing the results of numerous scientific studies that mention the finds of bonfires left by hominins in Europe, Israel, Asia and North Africa, came to the conclusion that our ancestors mastered the skill of making fire 400 thousand years ago, that is, long before the ancestors of modern man left Africa and began to settle on other continents.

Up to this point, there is practically no evidence of purposeful fire breeding in archaeological excavations, and after that it is widespread everywhere, and everywhere scientists find the same evidence — charcoal, charred bones and deposits exposed to heat.

Excluding the randomness of such an important event in human evolution, the authors came to the conclusion that already in the second half of the Middle Pleistocene, primitive communication was developed among human ancestors, which was expressed in the spread of cultural skills.

"Until now, it was believed that the cultural spread began only 70 thousand years ago, when modern people began to settle homo sapiens," the words of the first author of the article, archaeologist Catherine McDonald, are quoted in a press release from Leiden University. — But the data on the use of fire now shows that this happened much earlier."

According to the researchers, this is the first case of "cultural dissemination" in archaeological records.

"Since several subpopulations of hominins have survived and left evidence of the use of fire, it is unlikely that the methods associated with the use of fire were transferred by a single dispersed subpopulation," the authors write.

As a confirmation of their conclusions, scientists give another example. About 100 thousand years after the appearance of the first bonfires, a special technology for processing stone tools, known as the Levallois industry, spread at the same speed among ancient people. Even in a shorter period of time than fire, this technique has spread across northwestern Europe and the Middle East. At the same time, unlike the use of fire, Levallois ' technique required time for training.

According to the authors, this implies the presence of strong social interactions between hominin populations in the Early Paleolithic, which then for some reason were disrupted. For comparison, in the Late Paleolithic, it took more than a hundred thousand years for a stone axe to "cross" from Africa to Europe.

Genetic data indicate that there was mixing between different species of ancient people, but the fact that many of these populations exhibit similar behavior and processing methods suggests that they were in close contact with each other.

"Members of these subpopulations have clashed with each other repeatedly and for a very long time, creating the basis for cultural dissemination," the authors write.

If the conclusions made by scientists are correct, it turns out that large-scale social connections existed among hominins even before the appearance of modern humans.

The article was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Image © Zdenek Burian
Source: RIA Novosti, sci-dig.ru