First entry in the JFFS? In which cave might I find that edition of the JFFS? Finding references in those days or following a subscription involved a lot of travel…
The problem was that with mounting subscription charges, only some caves had JFFS, and if you wanted a stone inscription of an article, you had to request it through inter-cave loan.
Og!
Huh, I guess I always sort of assumed that was true, given that we have evolved an intestinal tract largely adapted for cooked food. I suppose 50,000 years and a couple of bottlenecks might have permitted that, but it seems a stretch.
It isn’t rocket engineering to grab some burning branches from a fire caused by lightning.
Even the Australian aborigines figured that out although they never invented the wheel or how to boil water as they hadn’t figured out how to make containers to hold it.
Also never copied Indonesian fishing boats when those guys turned up in the north.
They did make the megafauna extinct and with their use of fire spread the Eucalyptus pestilence throughout Australia. We have now inflicted this pest on the rest of the world.
They do insist that we acknowledge them as “custodians of the country”.
Continental ecological disaster. Yay. Someone’s got to start the fire.
When I was in college there was some theory that the North American Great Plains were the Great Plains instead of the Great Forest because the natives burned it down as part of their hunting practices. I tried googling; it seems that there’s no evidence that they could burn down that big of a forest, but regardless, it’s ok when they do it. Nobel red man, guardian of the ecosystem, and all that.
Maybe glacial till (a fine, dense-packed soil) combined with fire ecology and large herd animals created the Great Plains?
Most likely the rain shadow of two tall mountain ranges.
Funny enough, aborignes are one of the modern human populations that could be related to the homo erectus mentioned at the link
Using fire is one thing….creating fire is much more significant, I think.
There’s a school of woke archaeology says women abruptly developed human language and Upper Paleolithic technology including fire in the wake of the Toba eruption between 70k and 50k years ago, It’s nonsense. Does anybody remember the movie “Quest for Fire?” Rae-Dawn Chong starkers for the whole thing, dressed in paint. Hilarious, but it portrays Lower Paleolithic Archaics who use and maintain found fire. My guess is Proto-world began coalescing about 300k years ago as anatomically modern H. sap developed. Somewhere in there some flint-knapper with access to pyrite discovered sparks.
And these proto-humans published their results in the Journal of Fire and Fire Starting (J. Fire Fire Start.)?
Journal of FFS.
They were people. They were no more stupid than we are today.
We’ve probably been using wheels for a lot longer than we thought, too, but wooden wheels don’t preserve well. The earliest example we have of a wheel is actually a millstone.
Interesting article last year that at least one of the times the wheel and axle was invented was for mining.
On the subject of mining, I am reminded of the STOS episode The Cloud Minders, the one with the daughter of the mayor of the cloud city Stratos having the senior officers of the Enterprise wrapped around her little finger, and where an underclass worked mines where they were exposed to fumes from the mineral they were mining. Kirk forces a settlement between the sublime, intellectually disposed residents of Stratos and the rebel miners by supplying personal protective equipment to the miners so they could continue to toil but without as great a reduction in their life expectancy.
I asked the Copilot LLM if there was a metaphor in there somewhere, and I think I brought this up discussing Athens and Sparta and recent-day historians who view many of the conflicts in modern times through the lens of Athens and Sparta.
Although if you dig into details of ancient Sparta, they were murderously nasty to the Helots whom the subjugated, the AI reminded me that Athens may have been the goodies, but they were putting slaves to work in silver mines, and along the lines that Hollywood does not have an original thought, The Cloud Minders is a transparent retelling of Ancient Athens..
Ahh the sublime TOS. Which episode is it this week? The Prime Directive one or the General Order 24 one?
As another franchise once pointed out: “It all depends upon your point of view…”
The article says hono erectus, which were genetically linked in 2026 to humans via interbreeding with denisovans
One interesting thing about wheels is many societies that know of them have little use for them. The Mesoamerican cultures had wheeled toys, but no draft animals (native dogs were too small). The Andeans had big animals but lived in territory so rough their roads have stairs. Wheeled vehicle first appeared on the plains of Central Asia, where they had flat land and horses.
Such a hot topic. ahem…
Fire . . . bad!
First entry in the JFFS? In which cave might I find that edition of the JFFS? Finding references in those days or following a subscription involved a lot of travel…
The problem was that with mounting subscription charges, only some caves had JFFS, and if you wanted a stone inscription of an article, you had to request it through inter-cave loan.
Og!
Huh, I guess I always sort of assumed that was true, given that we have evolved an intestinal tract largely adapted for cooked food. I suppose 50,000 years and a couple of bottlenecks might have permitted that, but it seems a stretch.
It isn’t rocket engineering to grab some burning branches from a fire caused by lightning.
Even the Australian aborigines figured that out although they never invented the wheel or how to boil water as they hadn’t figured out how to make containers to hold it.
Also never copied Indonesian fishing boats when those guys turned up in the north.
They did make the megafauna extinct and with their use of fire spread the Eucalyptus pestilence throughout Australia. We have now inflicted this pest on the rest of the world.
They do insist that we acknowledge them as “custodians of the country”.
Continental ecological disaster. Yay. Someone’s got to start the fire.
When I was in college there was some theory that the North American Great Plains were the Great Plains instead of the Great Forest because the natives burned it down as part of their hunting practices. I tried googling; it seems that there’s no evidence that they could burn down that big of a forest, but regardless, it’s ok when they do it. Nobel red man, guardian of the ecosystem, and all that.
Maybe glacial till (a fine, dense-packed soil) combined with fire ecology and large herd animals created the Great Plains?
Most likely the rain shadow of two tall mountain ranges.
Funny enough, aborignes are one of the modern human populations that could be related to the homo erectus mentioned at the link
Using fire is one thing….creating fire is much more significant, I think.
There’s a school of woke archaeology says women abruptly developed human language and Upper Paleolithic technology including fire in the wake of the Toba eruption between 70k and 50k years ago, It’s nonsense. Does anybody remember the movie “Quest for Fire?” Rae-Dawn Chong starkers for the whole thing, dressed in paint. Hilarious, but it portrays Lower Paleolithic Archaics who use and maintain found fire. My guess is Proto-world began coalescing about 300k years ago as anatomically modern H. sap developed. Somewhere in there some flint-knapper with access to pyrite discovered sparks.
And these proto-humans published their results in the Journal of Fire and Fire Starting (J. Fire Fire Start.)?
Journal of FFS.
They were people. They were no more stupid than we are today.
We’ve probably been using wheels for a lot longer than we thought, too, but wooden wheels don’t preserve well. The earliest example we have of a wheel is actually a millstone.
Interesting article last year that at least one of the times the wheel and axle was invented was for mining.
On the subject of mining, I am reminded of the STOS episode The Cloud Minders, the one with the daughter of the mayor of the cloud city Stratos having the senior officers of the Enterprise wrapped around her little finger, and where an underclass worked mines where they were exposed to fumes from the mineral they were mining. Kirk forces a settlement between the sublime, intellectually disposed residents of Stratos and the rebel miners by supplying personal protective equipment to the miners so they could continue to toil but without as great a reduction in their life expectancy.
I asked the Copilot LLM if there was a metaphor in there somewhere, and I think I brought this up discussing Athens and Sparta and recent-day historians who view many of the conflicts in modern times through the lens of Athens and Sparta.
Although if you dig into details of ancient Sparta, they were murderously nasty to the Helots whom the subjugated, the AI reminded me that Athens may have been the goodies, but they were putting slaves to work in silver mines, and along the lines that Hollywood does not have an original thought, The Cloud Minders is a transparent retelling of Ancient Athens..
Ahh the sublime TOS. Which episode is it this week? The Prime Directive one or the General Order 24 one?
As another franchise once pointed out: “It all depends upon your point of view…”
The article says hono erectus, which were genetically linked in 2026 to humans via interbreeding with denisovans
One interesting thing about wheels is many societies that know of them have little use for them. The Mesoamerican cultures had wheeled toys, but no draft animals (native dogs were too small). The Andeans had big animals but lived in territory so rough their roads have stairs. Wheeled vehicle first appeared on the plains of Central Asia, where they had flat land and horses.