hominins

Retouched tool patterns in the CJW assemblage. (A–E) Slender flakes are intentionally broken and used as blanks for retouching tipped tools. (G–I) Unifacially retouched points. (J–M) Borers. Credit: IVPP A new study from the Nihewan basin of China has revealed that hominins who possessed advanced knapping abilities equivalent to Mode 2 technological features occupied East Asia as early as 1.1 million years ago (Ma), which is…

Researchers find evidence of fire that dates back at least 800,000 years.The researchers find one of the earliest pieces of evidence supporting the usage of fire using cutting-edge AI methods.There’s a saying that where there’s smoke, there’s fire, and Weizmann Institute of Science researchers are working hard to explore that claim, or at the very least to define what “smoke” is. The researchers describe a cutting-edge, ground-breaking technique they have created and used to find nonvisual signs of fire that date back at…

Mastering fire cleared the way into whole new worlds for early humans – from accessing more nutrients through cooking (fueling an increase in brain size), to making the dark hours useful, and surviving migrations into harsher climates.  How and when this mastery happened, however, has been lost to time, with fragments of burnt material hinting our flame taming may have begun up to 1.5 million years ago. Now, scientists used AI to detect hidden clues of campfires from a Lower Paleolithic site in Israel, dating back to…