versión impresa ISSN 0038-2353 S. Afr. j. sci. v.108 n.5-6
Pretoria 2012 NEWS AND VIEWS Travis Rayne PickeringI, II, III
IDepartment of Anthropology, University of Wisconsin-Madison,
Madison, Wisconsin, USA IIInstitute for Human Evolution,
University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa
IIIPlio-Pleistocene Palaeontology Section, Department of
Vertebrates, Ditsong National Museum of Natural History
(Transvaal Museum), Pretoria, South Africa The essential roles
of fire in human evolution and in humanity's technological
mastery of the natural world are disproportional to our
understanding of its earliest domestication. Archaeologists
researching relatively recent occurrences of fire, only after
~0.4 Ma and mostly in Europe, are particularly critical of
earlier archaeological claims of fire from African sites older
than 1.0 million years old.1 The problem is that the initial
harnessing of fire was such an extraordinary accomplishment that
any claim of that achievement requires extraordinary evidence f