Originally published at: Study: Small-brained hominins used fire, engraved tools and cave walls, and buried their dead | Boing Boing
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This is exciting stuff, but one of the strongest arguments against this being a burial cave is that it’s very difficult to access. Pushing, pulling, and hauling a dead body through tiny openings and passages would have been pretty difficult. Possible, but difficult. Nonetheless, it’s significant and exciting, and I’m looking forward to reading the published results.
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This is indeed exciting, and the truth is it wouldn’t be that unexpected. Every human trait and behaviour has many antecedents. They have to. We always talk about the big milestones of Homo Sapiens (language, technology, tools, culture, fire, etc) as if they sprang from nowhere in us. But that never happens. Everything has antecedents. We’re learning, for example, that chimp calls have grammar and regional accents. It’s not language, to be clear, but it has antecedents of language in it.
It would be perfect reasonable to find an earlier hominid who made fire and engaged in a slightly higher level of ritual culture than other primates. In fact, evolutionary theory predicts we must find it sooner or later.
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True, but that could also be the reason for it… you’d only get back in there in the most extreme of circumstances, and you’d want protection from anyone messing with your dead… So, it’s possible, I’d argue, that the difficulty is part of the appeal of using it as a burial space.
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This is the mystery. I agree, putting the body somewhere remote is part of the appeal.
Non-paywall version of the article Carla links is here: https://archive.ph/fF9bA
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I guess what’s most difficult in these questions is figuring out intentionality… We don’t have any written records, of course, so we can’t really determine their intentions…
And this is why I prefer researching stuff from the past century! 
I run much less risk of making assumptions without proof to back it up!
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That’s called “current events.” 
You early modernist are all alike! 
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Didn’t homo erectus use fire about 2 million years ago?
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… and occasionally won higher office. Nothing changes.
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This is a truly wonderful discovery. Adding my own uneducated speculation, perhaps naledi learned directly from sapiens, or vice versa, since their lives overlapped a bit.
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so says wikipedia
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I guess this is just more confirmation that our cousins had some of the same skills as homo sapiens…
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The problem is figuring out the difference between “use,” “control,” and “create.” There’s some evidence that homo erectus used and maybe controlled fire, but not (yet?) good evidence that they could create it.
The “oldest unequivocal evidence” for “creating” is still only around 300k years ago.
One issue:
Even when signs of potential burning are present, it can be surprisingly hard to understand their exact origin. Researchers recently determined that the “burned” darkened wood and reddened sediments found at a site in northern Germany, now a coal mine called Schöningen, were really colored by water exposure and soil decomposition, not ancient flames. Even if evidence for flames is more certain, it can be tricky to tell if the fire was the result of a natural blaze or a human-made spark, or if people harvested it from a nearby wildfire for their own use. Even harder to decipher is whether people were using those fires “regularly,” and whether that means every week, year, or decade.
People have found flint in what are clearly cooking pits, but that flint may have been from spearpoints used to kill the animal, and then which dropped into the fire during cooking. So the fires could still have been harvested.
Also interesting:
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yeah, i was going to say something to that end, and couldn’t quite figure out the words ( the wikipedia article doesn’t actually get into it as well as you just did )
harvesting fire is a cool term a hot term? fire, even. anyway.
And everyone knows that if you plant ice you’re gonna harvest wind.
See also the God of the Gaps theory of evolutionary development. It’s not perfectly continuous, but there will be likely small steps between big jumps.
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See also punctuated equilibrium. Things don’t advance smoothly and linearly. There may be jumps and long periods of stasis, but as you say, the gaps won’t ever be all that big because evolution can’t make big moves. It’s an optimizing process that works iteratively (and often gets stuck in hilarious local maxima as a result).
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we are kind of funny looking, aren’t we. 
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Sure, the brains help. But thumbs go a long way, too.
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