Overview
- This week, a PLOS One paper led by Dr. Liora Kolska Horwitz and Prof. Michael Chazan reports small mammal bones found about 30 metres into Wonderwerk Cave that were burned between roughly 1.07 and 1.79 million years ago.
- Researchers identified heating on hundreds of tiny bones using a portable, non‑destructive bone‑luminescence technique and confirmed the results with chemical analyses.
- Magnetostratigraphy and burial/cosmic‑ray exposure dating produced an overlapping chronology that places repeated burn events in an Acheulean‑bearing layer likely linked to Homo erectus.
- The team argues the depth of the finds, the absence of guano in the layer, and the owl‑pellet context make natural wildfire or spontaneous combustion unlikely, implying hominins transported and maintained fires inside the cave.
- The authors stress the data show repeated use and maintenance of fire rather than proof that early hominins could make fire at will, and the new method gives archaeologists a tool to test other ancient sites.