Signatures of early fire at Evron Quarry (1.0 to 0.8 Mya) | Hacker News Reader

Signatures of early fire at Evron Quarry (1.0 to 0.8 Mya)

pnas.org

30 pointsdiodorus10 comments

Are there any other animals besides humans that prefer cooked food? Not just that will eat it, but will actually go out of their way to get cooked food if possible? My assumption here is that before humans developed the ability to create and control fire, they needed the motivation to do so, and I'd expect coming across accidentally cooked food, then deciding they liked it and trying to come up with ways to make it less accidental, would be an important first step in developing fire making technology. Fire making is unique to humans AFAIK, but I'm wondering if any other animals show any of the precursors.

I love that you asked this. My biologist friends often surprise me with fun animal facts, i'm so excited to see what someone says. I'm forwarding your question to a group text right now...

Well, after an over night wait I have a rather lacklustre response for you: "Hmmmm. I haven’t really looked into cooking but - no - not that I am aware of. "

I appreciate your asking!

I also find the "fire hawks" cited in other comments on this thread fascinating.

I read somewhere that house cats (feral, they're an invasive species there) in Australia have been seen carrying burning items from a wildfire to another area to spread the fire. This causes their prey to run from hiding.

Have heard of this for birds, but not cats. Perhaps the cats learned from the birds, this article says it's been going on a long time. Causes prey to run away from the fire tho, it may be that actually getting caught in a fire and cooked is a rare occasion (rarer still, not being burnt to a crisp in the process, the key to cooking is to take it off the fire!)

https://altoona.psu.edu/feature/birds-fire

Having participated in some controlled burns, I'd say it's actually pretty common (at least in prairie ecosystems). Have seen a variety of small, cooked mammals.

Oof, my condolonces. Would you be qualified to say what becomes of these cooked mammals? Food for anybody, or just ash?

Canines could fall into this category if you stretch the imagination a little. They initially followed humans around scavenging scraps, some of which would have been cooked.

It seems conceivable that they preferred the cooked food in smaller quantities to hunting themselves for larger prey.

Relevant to the techies here, machine learning in archeology sounds like an interesting niche:

> Recently, we developed a spectroscopic “thermometer” based on Raman spectroscopy and deep learning (DL) algorithms to estimate the exposure of flint artifacts to heat, independent of visual indications of heat exposure [...]

> Temperatures were estimated using a 1D-CNN and a fully connected artificial neural network (FC-ANN), as described elsewhere. When compared to FC-ANN (20), the 1D-CNN model reduces the mean absolute error (MAE) between the true and estimated temperatures on the validation experiment from 118 to 103 °C

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