Professor Marlize Lombard from the University of Johannesburg, South Africa, who specializes in stone age archaeology, and Peter Gärdenfors, a professor of cognitive science at the University of Lund, Sweden, collaborated to study the cognitive implications of early fire-making techniques.
In their paper titled “Minds on Fire: Cognitive Aspects of Early Firemaking and the Possible Inventors of Firemaking Kits,” published in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal, the researchers argue that Neanderthals and previous modern human cultures separately invented fire-making techniques, each with its own cognitive implications.
The team analyzed the two primary fire-making techniques used by past hunter-gatherers: the strike-a-light and the manual fire-drill. They evaluated the methods in terms of causal, social, and prospective reasoning.
The more complex fire-drill kit likely originated in Africa, where it could only have been invented by modern humans. The researchers point out that fire was used for sophisticated technological processes, such as the heat treatment of rocks, to improve their knapping ability in southern Africa since ~160,000 years ago.
On the other hand, researchers suggest that Neanderthal populations in Eurasia most likely invented the strike-a-light fire-making technique. Archaeological evidence of fire is relatively common in Europe from ~130,000–35,000 years ago.
2023-06-01 04:30:02
Source from phys.org