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Earth Science

Carbon Record Reveals Evidence of Extensive Human Fire Use 50,000 Years Ago (phys.org) 21

Posted by EditorDavid from the burn-rate dept.
"It has long been unclear when humans started using fire," writes Phys.org... To address this question, researchers from the Institute of Oceanology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (IOCAS), alongside collaborators from China, Germany, and France, analyzed the pyrogenic carbon record in a 300,000-year-old sediment core from the East China Sea. "Our findings challenge the widely held belief that humans only began influencing the environment with fire in the recent past, during the Holocene," said Dr. Zhao Debo, the study's corresponding author.

This study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, highlights the presence of charred plant remains — known as pyrogenic carbon — formed when vegetation burns but is not completely consumed by fire. The research reveals a notable increase in fire activity across East Asia approximately 50,000 years ago. This finding aligns with earlier reports of heightened fire activities in Europe, Southeast Asia, and the Papua New Guinea-Australia region respectively, suggesting a continental-scale intensification of fire use during this period... The study highlights that this global rise in fire use coincides with the rapid spread of Homo sapiens, increasing population densities, and a greater reliance on fire, particularly amid cold, glacial conditions...

These conclusions have significant implications for understanding Earth's sensitivity to human impacts. If human fire management altered atmospheric carbon levels tens of thousands of years ago, current climate models may underestimate the historical baseline of human-environment interactions.

Carbon Record Reveals Evidence of Extensive Human Fire Use 50,000 Years Ago More | Reply

Carbon Record Reveals Evidence of Extensive Human Fire Use 50,000 Years Ago

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  • Would campfires and cooking fires really be detectable over the large scale natural wildfires?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mspohr ( 589790 )

      Yes

    • Not many caves have wildfires.

    • Did you read the article? 300,000 years of data ... noticeable uptick starting at 50,000 years ago. So they are claiming a 250,000 year baseline which gives a confident "Yes" to this question.

      Wildfire has been around as long as plants have been around. But something increased the amount of pyrogenic carbon being produced in China starting 50,000 years ago and the best explanation is "humans".
      “Charcoal has been recorded from all geological strata of sedimentary origin in all continents since th

  • "Our findings challenge the widely held belief that humans only began influencing the environment with fire in the recent past"

    This brings into question all their findings. No way a million hunter and gatherers had any significant impact other than an occasional wildfire, which we still do by mistake today. The difference is that today we can leverage fossil fuels to extract more fossil fuels; we aren't picking up sticks by hand like our ancestor's did. So obviously this study has a political agenda.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Funny thing about science, science seeks to correct itself. Science is not about beliefs or standing still. Science evolves as new information becomes available. Follow the data not your team's story they want you to believe.

    • So obviously this study has a political agenda.

      I had some suspicions there could be a political agenda here but after some thought I'm not sure what it might be. This is unlikely to be related to anything about fossil fuel use because in the time period there was not likely to be any significant use of coal or petroleum. Coal mining didn't really have an impact on human civilization until the 18th century. Petroleum for fuel was quite limited until the late 19th century. I'm not certain when natural gas was put to use as a fuel, that was pretty rece

    • significant impact

      That's your words, not theirs. They said influencing the environment. They never said scale or significance of impact. Their criteria was if the impact was measurable compared in emissions compared to the background, and even then you admit that they could have had a significant impact in your own sentence. How are they "kidding you" if you even postulate how the answer could be correct?

      Bit more thinking, bit less knee jerking, and when you make a point try not to undermine it within the same sentence.

  • Makes sense, fire = calories, calories = survival (Score:3, Interesting)

    by MacMann ( 7518492 ) on Sunday June 29, 2025 @12:29PM (#65484288)

    With fire humans are better able to survive in the cold. Not just because it is a means to stay warm, and therefore not need as much food to fight off the cold, but to cook food to get more calories from the food they do find and eat.

    I've seen people try to compare the human digestive system to other animals as a means to establish how diets compare. The human digestive tract ends up not being not all that comparable to carnivores or herbivores. Humans eat a lot of stuff, we are omnivores, but most of all humans eat mostly cooked food and there's no other species that cooks their food.

    Of course humans eat plenty of raw fruits and vegetables, but we are selective in the plant material we eat raw in that we pick out the energy dense fruits, seeds, and so forth than try eating the entire plant like deer, cattle, or sheep. Instead we consume this plant material indirectly by eating the deer, cattle, and sheep. We have these animals extract the nutrients and calories in the plants, and store a part of that in their tissues. We collect this animal tissue by hunting and domestication, and then we partially digest these tissues before consumption with heat. Heating meat over a fire means less work for our digestion to get out the nutrients, proteins, and calories.

    With so much energy dense food, and not needing to expend as much energy to remain warm because we have external heat from fire, that means more calories to feed a complex brain. Smarter humans are better prepared to survive increasingly complex problems and in harsher environments. With more humans surviving because of learning to use fire for cooking and heating then that means higher rates of population growth.

    Much of this was already known, but it appears the discovery shows humans developed fire earlier than originally thought and the practice spread wider than originally thought. As I recall there was some event or series of events that is believed to have thinned the human population to as few as 10,000 individuals. If that's the case then I suspect that the population loss prior to this was far larger than originally thought. But then I may have recalled the timeline or something incorrectly. Whatever the case this is an interesting discovery.

    • Correct. Ever try to eat uncooked rice or wheat or potatoes. Use of fire greatly expanded available foods. I get a bit annoyed when I hear that humans used fires to keep wild animals away.... In any event, look at the skeleton of a human, a bear and a gorilla. You will note that the human rib cage is markedly smaller. This is because we cook our food and digestion takes less time and we have shorter intestines.

      Now look at ancient human skeletons. Those rib cages look pretty small to me.

      • Correct. Ever try to eat uncooked rice or wheat or potatoes.

        This reminds me of another process of partial digestion before eating, fermentation.

        There's the Drunken Monkey Hypothesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

        The smell of ethanol from ripened fruit carries well and so can give an indication of where calorie rich food can be found. Consuming ethanol can bring pain relief/insensitivity and reduced inhibitions, both of which are useful in winning a fight with anything else that might come along to compete for this food. Ethanol is poisonous so those able to be

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