Early Humans Used Fire and Made Grass Beds 200,000 Years Ago

Border Cave, South Africa

2020-08 - 200 000 years ago, humans preferred to kip cozy - Wits University

Here's the sort of problem for Young Earth Creationists that they have to dismiss every day in order to avoid changing their minds.

Despite their belief in the recent origins of humans and their belief in the childish tale of Noah's Ark and a global flood, there is evidence from South Africa that humans lived in a cave and used grass as bedding, and this evidence was not washed away in a catastrophic flood which, if it was anything like the one YECs believe in, would have scoured the cave clean of this evidence.

However, it didn't, so, like the cave paintings in France and Spain, we still have the evidence these early humans left behind, including, in this case, the evidence that they had controlled use of fire. The beds were laid on layers of ash, probably to deter crawling insects or left behind when a bed was deliberately burned to destroy resident parasites.

It was when humans began to use caves as regular shelters, complete with beds that they returned to frequently, that many of our commensal parasites evolved, including bed bugs whose ancestors were

We know that people worked as well as slept on the grass surface because the debris from stone tool manufacture is mixed with the grass remains. Also, many tiny, rounded grains of red and orange ochre were found in the bedding where they may have rubbed off human skin or coloured objects.

Lyn Wadley, Lead author.

parasitic blood-suckers on bats. A bed in a regularly-used cave must have been teeming with parasitic arthropods and their eggs and larva.

The cave is Border Cave, a well-known archaeological site on a cliff between eSwatini (Swaziland) and KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa. The beds, or seating platforms were made at the back of the cave from sheaves of broad-leaved grasses of the Panicoideae subfamily. Remains of Tarchonanthus (camphor bush) have also been found as the top layer in the oldest bedding in the cave. This is still used to deter insects in parts of East Africa.

Border Cave plant bedding from 5WA-DBK and 1 WA.

(A) Horizontal field view of silicified bedding in 5WA-DBK. Scale bar, 30 mm. (B and C) SEM images of grass fragments from (A). Scale bar in (B), 100 μm. Scale bar in (C), 30 μm. (D) Vertical field section of desiccated bedding grass on Member 1 WA ash (~43 ky old). 5WA-DBK bedding may have looked like this 200 ky ago. Scale bar, 10 mm

The Border Cave study was carried out by a multidisciplinary team including scientists from the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS University of Bordeaux), and Université Côte d’Azur, France, the Instituto Superior de Estudios Sociales, Tucumán, Argentina, and the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage, Belgium. Their results were published a few days ago in Science.

Abstract

Early plant use is seldom described in the archaeological record because of poor preservation. We report the discovery of grass bedding used to create comfortable areas for sleeping and working by people who lived in Border Cave at least 200,000 years ago. Sheaves of grass belonging to the broad-leafed Panicoideae subfamily were placed near the back of the cave on ash layers that were often remnants of bedding burned for site maintenance. This strategy is one forerunner of more-complex behavior that is archaeologically discernible from ~100,000 years ago.

Wadley, Lyn; Esteban, Irene; de la Peña, Paloma; Wojcieszak, Marine; Stratford, Dominic; Lennox, Sandra; d’Errico, Francesco; Rosso, Daniela Eugenia; Orange, François; Backwell, Lucinda; Sievers, Christine
Fire and grass-bedding construction 200 thousand years ago at Border Cave, South Africa
Science 2020 vol: 369 (6505) pp: 863-866 DOI: 10.1126/science.abc7239

Copyright © 2020 The Authors,
Published by The American Association for the Advancement of Science
Reprinted by kind permission under license #4891260159600

It'll be interesting to see what mental gymnastics creationists will use to avoid accepting this evidence that humans evolved in Africa a very long time ago and that there never was a global flood. No doubt it'll all be a lie as part of a massive conspiracy or a misinterpretation of the data which, when looked at from the perspective of a YEC, is clear evidence that the Bible is real history.

---

Tweet Link