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Earth Science

Carbon Record Reveals Evidence of Extensive Human Fire Use 50,000 Years Ago (phys.org) 25

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?

  • Makes sense, fire = calories, calories = survival (Score:4, 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

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by _dj6_ ( 8250908 )

      Heating meat over a fire means less work for our digestion to get out the nutrients, proteins, and calories.

      Cooked meat is actually HARDER to digest than raw meat. Cooking meat offers advantages though.. it's less likely to contain active microbes that will make you sick; it can be preserved for a longer period of time; it tastes much better; fat can be rendered out and used for many useful purposes including making torches, water proofing materials, etc..

      Vegetables are very different than meat. Many plant species have toxins in them that make them inedible for humans which can be destroyed through heating/cookin

  • 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.

    No, the implications have something to do with climate but not via carbon. They have to do with our understanding of human history and maybe that humans in early civilizations in North Africa, Mongolia and the ME Gulf region may have deforested those areas through thousands of years of logging and animal husbandry (which overgrazed saplings) so significantly that it started a desertification process that we see the results of today.

  • So the ice age 20.000 years age was the humans fault? Ehat about all the bufallos and other mammals farting their way through life?

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