Discovery Of Fire

The Discovery of Fire
The discovery of fire or, more precisely, the controlled use of fire was, of necessity, one of the earliest of human discoveries. Fire's purposes are multiple, some of whichare to add light and heat, to cook plants and animals, to clear forests for planting, to heat-treat stone for making stone tools, to burn clay for ceramic objects.

Discovery of Fire
The controlleduse of fire was an invention of the Early Stone Age (or Lower Paleolithic). The earliest evidence for controlled use of fire is at the Lower Paleolithic site of Gesher Benot Ya'aqov in Israel, wherecharred wood and seeds were recovered from a site dated 790,000 years ago.

Not everybody believes that; the next oldest site is at Zhoukoudian, a Lower Paleolithic site in China dated to about400,000 BP, and at Qesem Cave (Israel), between about 200,000-400,000 years ago.

In a paper published in Nature in March 2011, Roebroeks and Villa report their examinations of the available data forEuropean sites and conclude that habitual use of fire wasn't part of the human (meaning early modern and Neanderthal both) suite of behaviors until ca. 300,000 to 400,000 years ago. They argue that theearlier sites are representative of opportunistic use of natural fires.

•Read more about Roebroeks and Villa's findings
Hearth Fire Construction
As opposed to fire, a hearth is a deliberatelyconstructed fireplace. The earliest fireplaces were made by collecting stones to contain the fire, or simply reusing the same location again and again and allowing the ash to act as hearth construct.Those are found in the Middle Paleolithic period (ca 200,000-40,000 years ago, at sites such as Klasies River Caves (South Africa, 125,000 years ago) and Tabun Cave (at Mt. Carmel, Israel)

Earth ovens,on the other hand, are hearths with banked and sometimes domed structures built of clay. These types of hearths were first used during the Upper Paleolithic (ca 40,000-20,000 years BP), for...