Ancient myths recognizedhow importantcontrolling fire was to human race , making us a menace to the god . The timing of this great maturation has been much debated , however . A new discovery indicates we have been changing our surroundings with firing for at least 92,000 years .
On arriver in unexampled lands , human being have used fire to alter them to befit their need . “ Firestick agriculture ” translate the landscape of Australia and North America , creating environments easily suited to hunting and reducing the chance of devastatingly large inferno . Anthropologists are seek to determine when this early technology was mastered , and in particular , whether it preceded humankind ’s expansion out of Africa .
The difficulty in resolving this question is that thousands of old age later , the changes work by human flack seem similar to those started by lightning . However , Yale’sDr Jessica Thompsonhas find a distinctive signal in sediments around the edge of Lake Malawi , one of the largest lakes in Africa .
Over a 600,000 year period , these sediments reveal change in the abundance and diversity of pollen as nearby plant life shifted with changing climate . Around 92,000 old age ago , Thompson found an gain in charcoal deposit , indicate more frequent fires in the lake ’s catchment field .
Such a modification could have several crusade , but Thompson reports inScience Advancesit coincides with a decline in the richness of pollen . “ Tree that indicate obtuse , structurally complex forest canopies are no longer common and are replaced by pollen from plants that deal well with frequent attack and disturbance , ” Thompson said in astatement . More sediment was fix around this time as well , along with more human - made artifact . With highlands less covered by forests , heavy rain brought more soil down with them , sometimes accompanied by the items our ancestor had shaped .
What these change did not coincide with was new climatic conditions . Lake Malawi has shrink drastically during ironical full point , but stay high at this time .
" One way or another , it ’s due to human bodily process , " Thompsonsaid . What we do n’t know was whether the changes were deliberate or not . Perhaps an increase in the density of human population in the area meant more campfire , which in turn led to more escaping and setting nearby wood climb down .
Nevertheless , the fire - users almost sure enough profit , creating an ecosystem more attractive to magnanimous fair game .
The timing of this development lines up reasonably closely with the estimated dates at which Homo Sapiens left Africa . However , Centennial State - authorDr Alex Mackayof the University of Wollongong told IFLScience we do n’t know if the use of fire as a land direction tool helped make this possible . “ There is grounds the range of thing humans were capable of doing blow up around 100,000 years ago . ” Mackay secernate IFLScience . “ We do n’t know whether or not this was the thing that made migration potential . ”
This was certainly not humanity ’s first use of fire . Last calendar week evidencewas publishedof fire more than a million years ago in a South African cave that would have ask world to play both spark and fuel . Homo Sapiens had n’t even evolved then . Moreover , our biologysuggests ancestral species have been eat cooked food for around two million years .
This allow for a long interruption between the role of flack for heat and prepare to harnessing it to change surround ecosystems . Mackay told IFLScience humans may have been using ardour to exchange the landscape much before . However , if this hap in outside the great lake region , for deterrent example in southerly Africa , it might not have left behind a signaling we can take . “ Humans co - evolved with fauna in Africa and it is tough to disentangle man the human encroachment from the rest , ” Mackay enounce .
