Sandy remnants of ancient hearths

摘要

The domestic arrangements of our distant ancestors may be revealed by looking for sand-like deposits left behind in their fires, say scientists in Israel and the US. And the processes that produced these deposits may have led archaeologists to underestimate the age of ancient stone tools. Archaeologists are keen to know how early humans divided their living spaces into areas for cooking, storage, rubbish disposal and the like. But fires are hard to pinpoint because ash often disappears over the ages. "You can still find the charcoal and flints, but something happens to the ash," says Ofer Bar-Yosef of Harvard University.