Harnessing Fire and the Wood Fireplaces
Harnessing the power of fire is one of humankind’s oldest achievements, as early humans discovered it could cook animals and plants, could help clear forests in order to plant fields, even to treat stones to make tools and to heat clay to make ceramics, allowing for bowls and utensils, and so on. The use of fire first developed in the Early Stone Age, also known as the Lower Paleolithic. The earliest use we know of to date is that fire began in Israel, at a site known as Gesher Benot Ya’aqov — seven hundred and ninety thousand years ago. Of course, there’s controversy of the exact date, and there are other sites as well, including the Zhoukoudian, which is also from the Lower oPaleolithic age, in China, and it dates to around four hundred thousand years ago, while another site in Israel, Qesem Cave, contains examples of the controlled use of fire somewhere between two hundred and four hundred thousand years ago.
While these examples are of the use of fire, they weren’t examples of a fireplace. And the first wood fireplaces were made by simply taking a collection of stones and using them to contain the the fire. If the fire-users built the fire in the same place again and again, the ashes themselves made a kind of hearth. Examples of these sites are from the Middle Paleolithic period (some two hundred thousand to forty thousand years ago) in caves in South Africa and Israel (the Klasies River Caves in South Africa were in use around one hundred and twenty-five years ago, for instance).
Evidence of these hearths are found as well in the Upper Paleolithic age (forty thousand to twenty thousand years). During this time, kilns for making pottery also came into being, found in the Klisoura Cave in Greece, some thirty-two thousand to thirty-four thousand years ago.
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