Researchers from the University of Toronto, the Weizmann Institute of Science and Hebrew University have identified new evidence of the use of fire by ancient humans at least 800,000 years ago at a site in western Israel.
The discovery, described in a study published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests only the sixth location worldwide of evidence of fire more than half a million years old….
Excerpted from In the Shadow of the Palms: More-Than-Human Becomings in West Papua. © 2022 Duke University Press. Reprinted with permission from Duke University Press.
The book In the Shadow of the Palms tells the story of how one group of people has encountered a plant that has radically upended their forest-based way of life. Over the past several decades, Indigenous Marind in the Indonesian-controlled region of West Papua have seen this introduced plant—oil palm—expand across their customary forests, lands, and territories in the form of industrial plantations.
This article was originally published at Knowable Magazine and has been republished with Creative Commons.
Most languages develop through centuries of use among groups of people. But some have a different origin: They are invented, from scratch, from one individual’s mind.
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