Humans in the Hoxnian: habitat, context and fire use at Beeches Pit, West Stow, Suffolk, UK

Preece, Richard C.; Gowlett, J. A. J.; Parfitt, Simon A.; Bridgland, David R.; Lewis, Simon G.

doi:10.1002/jqs.1043

Cited by 109 publications

(71 citation statements)

References 49 publications

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“…At Schöningen, the evidence consists of some heated flints (although mostly natural pieces) (22) and charred wood, including a wooden tool, with the studies of possible remains of former hearths still in progress (23). At Beeches Pit, dated to Marine Isotope Stage (MIS) 11 (Dataset S1), the evidence consists of heated lithics and heated sediments (24,25), interpreted as the remains of hearths. Terra Amata (France) and Vérteszöllös (Hungary) also provide credible evidence of fire, but estimates of their age vary from MIS 11 to 9.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the earliest evidence for habitual use of fire in Europe

Roebroeks

Villa

2011

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

566

317

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The timing of the human control of fire is a hotly debated issue, with claims for regular fire use by early hominins in Africa at ∼1.6 million y ago. These claims are not uncontested, but most archaeologists would agree that the colonization of areas outside Africa, especially of regions such as Europe where temperatures at time dropped below freezing, was indeed tied to the use of fire. Our review of the European evidence suggests that early hominins moved into northern latitudes without the habitual use of fire. It was only much later, from ∼300,000 to 400,000 y ago onward, that fire became a significant part of the hominin technological repertoire. It is also from the second half of the Middle Pleistocene onward that we can observe spectacular cases of Neandertal pyrotechnological knowledge in the production of hafting materials. The increase in the number of sites with good evidence of fire throughout the Late Pleistocene shows that European Neandertals had fire management not unlike that documented for Upper Paleolithic groups.human evolution | Paleolithic archeology | fireplaces | hafting adhesives T he emergence of stone tool manufacture and the control of fire are undoubtedly the two most significant events in the technological evolution of early humans. Although stone tool use and manufacture were regular activities from at least 2.6 million y ago (1), the timing of the human control of fire is a controversial issue (2), with some claims for regular fire use by early hominins in Africa at ∼1.6 million y ago (3-5). Longer chronologies for the use of fire include Wrangham's recent hypothesis that fire was a central evolutionary force toward larger human brains (6-9): eating cooked foods made early hominin digestion easier, and the energy formerly spent on digestion was freed up, enabling their energy-expensive brains to grow. Using fire to prepare food made early humans move away from the former feed-as-you-go-and-eat-raw-food strategy and toward the sharing of cooked foods around fires, which became attractive locations for increased social interaction between individuals. Wrangham situates these developments around the time of the emergence of Homo erectus, approximately two million y ago. Most archeologists would agree that the colonization of areas outside of Africa, especially of regions such as Europe where temperatures at time dropped below freezing (10), was tied to the use of fire to bridge gaps in the energy budget and in resource availability during winter (11). For much later periods, a greater control and more extensive use of fire is seen by some (12, 13) as one of the behavioral innovations that emerged in Africa among modern humans, favoring their spread throughout the world and their eventual evolutionary success.How strong are these hypotheses? To what extent are they backed up by archeological data on hominin use of fire? Our focus in this review is on Europe, an area of the Old World for which we have a rich record with a large number of sampling points distributed in time and space, w...

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the earliest evidence for habitual use of fire in Europe

Roebroeks

Villa

2011

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

566

317

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“…Nevertheless fire was certainly controlled by 250 kya (James, 1989). Further back in time, few people would reject evidence for control of fire at 400 kya from such sites as Beeches Pit (Gowlett et al, 2005;Preece et al, 2006), Schöningen (Thieme, 2000;Thieme, 2005), and Ménez-Drégan (Monnier et al, 1994). Evidence for control of fire is also impressive at 790 kya at Gesher Benot Ya'aqov on the Jordan River (Goren-Inbar et al, 2004;Alperson-Afil, 2008), and there are several African sites older than 1 mya where control of fire has been reported as plausible or likely (Wrangham, 2006).…”

Section: The Impact Of Cooking On Human Evolutionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The energetic significance of cooking

Carmody¹,

Wrangham²

2009

Journal of Human Evolution

334

220

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While cooking has long been argued to improve the diet, the nature of the improvement has not been well defined. As a result, the evolutionary significance of cooking has variously been proposed as being substantial or relatively trivial. In this paper, we evaluate the hypothesis that an important and consistent effect of cooking food is a rise in its net energy value. The pathways by which cooking influences net energy value differ for starch, protein and lipid, and we therefore consider plant and animal foods separately.Evidence of compromised physiological performance among individuals on raw diets supports the hypothesis that cooked diets tend to provide energy. Mechanisms contributing to energy being gained from cooking include increased digestibility of starch and protein, reduced costs of digestion for cooked versus raw meat, and reduced energetic costs of detoxification and defense against pathogens. If cooking indeed consistently improves the energetic value of foods through such mechanisms, its evolutionary impact depends partly on the relative energetic benefits of non-thermal processing methods used prior to cooking.We suggest that if non-thermal processing methods, such as pounding, were used by Lower Paleolithic Homo, they likely provided an important increase in energy gain over unprocessed raw diets. However, cooking has critical effects not easily achievable by nonthermal processing, including the relatively complete gelatinization of starch, efficient denaturing of proteins, and killing of foodborne pathogens. This means that however sophisticated the non-thermal processing methods were, cooking would have conferred incremental energetic benefits. While much remains to be discovered, we conclude that the adoption of cooking would have led to an important rise in energy availability. For this reason, we predict that cooking had substantial evolutionary significance.

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“…Although cooking is clearly an important innovation in hominid evolution that served to increase dietary digestibility and quality, there is very limited evidence for the controlled use of fire by hominids prior to 1.5 Ma (Brain and Sillen, 1988;Bellomo, 1994;Pesini, 1999). The more widely held view is that the use of fire and cooking did not occur until considerably later in human evolution, probably closer to 200-250,000 years ago (Straus, 1989;Weiner et al, 1998), although possibly as early as 400,000 years ago (Preece et al, 2006). In addition, nutritional analyses of wild tubers used by modern foragers (e.g., Schoeninger et al, 2001) suggest that the energy content of these resources is markedly lower than that of animal foods, even after cooking (Cordain et al, 2001).…”

Section: Diet Qualitymentioning

confidence: 99%

The Energetics of Encephalization in Early Hominids

Snodgrass

Leonard

Robertson

2009

The Evolution of Hominin Diets

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Bioenergetics, the study of the use and transfer of energy, can provide important insights into the ecology and evolution of early hominids. Despite a relatively large brain with high metabolic demands, contemporary humans and other primates have resting metabolic rates (RMRs) that are similar to those of other mammals. As a result, a comparatively large proportion of their resting energy budget is spent on brain metabolism among humans (~20-25%) and other primates (~8-10%) compared to other mammals (~3-5%). To understand this shift in energy budget, Aiello and Wheeler's Expensive Tissue Hypothesis (ETH) posits a metabolic trade-off-a reduction in gut size with brain size increase-to explain this phenomenon. Here, we explore the interrelationships between brain size, body size, diet, and body composition using comparative data for humans, non-human primates, and other mammals. Among living primates, the relative proportion of energy allocated to brain metabolism is positively correlated with dietary quality. Contemporary humans fall at the positive end of this relationship, having both a high quality diet and a large brain. Thus, high costs associated with the large human brain are supported, in part, by energy-rich diets. Although contemporary humans display relatively small guts, primates as a group have gut sizes that are similar to non-primate mammals. In contrast, humans and other primates have significantly less skeletal muscle for their size compared to other mammals. These comparative analyses suggest that alterations in diet quality and body composition were necessary conditions for overcoming the constraints on encephalization. Fossil evidence indicates that brain expansion with the emergence of Homo erectus at about 1.8 million years ago was likely associated with important changes in diet, body composition, and body size.

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Humans in the Hoxnian: habitat, context and fire use at Beeches Pit, West Stow, Suffolk, UK

Cited by 109 publications

References 49 publications

On the earliest evidence for habitual use of fire in Europe

On the earliest evidence for habitual use of fire in Europe

The energetic significance of cooking

The Energetics of Encephalization in Early Hominids

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