Artificial intelligence may have unearthed one of the world's oldest campfires
Human ancestors may have been cooking at site in Israel nearly 1 million years ago
13 JUN 20223:00 PM
BY MICHAEL PRICE
It’s not always easy to find clues to ancient campfires. Bits of charcoal, cracked bones, and discolored rocks often give a prehistoric blaze away. But not every blaze leaves such obvious traces, especially after hundreds of thousands of years.
Now, using artificial intelligence (AI) to detect the subtle ways in which extreme heat warps a material’s atomic structure, scientists have discovered the potential presence of a nearly 1-million-year-old fire featuring dozens of purportedly burnt objects buried at an archaeological site in Israel. If the technique proves reliable, the findings could shed light on when, where, and why humans first learned to harness the flame.
Richard Wrangham, an anthropologist at Harvard University, is impressed with the new method. He has long advocated that our human ancestors evolved smaller guts and larger brains once they began to cook food, perhaps about 1.8 million years ago. “We need imaginative new methods” to pinpoint ancient fires, he says. “Now, we have one.”
Most studies of fire rely on the obvious bits of charcoal and other clues. But Filipe Natalio, an archaeological biochemist at the Weizmann Institute of Science, wanted to find a way to identify the invisible evidence fire leaves behind. Previous work, led in part by forensic scientists, has shown that burning alters bone structure at the atomic level, so burnt and unburnt human bones absorb different wavelengths of the infrared spectrum. Researchers can detect a charred bone using a technique known as Fourier-transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy, which measures the absorption of different wavelengths of light.
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https://www.science.org/content/article/artificial-intelligence-may-have-unearthed-one-world-s-oldest-campfires