Wild Things:
Life as We Know It
Toucans, Orchids, Monkeys and more
- By Amanda Bensen, Abby Callard, T.A. Frail, Ashley Luthern and Sarah Zielinski
- Smithsonian magazine, October 2009
(Kyle Brown / South African Coast Paleoclimate, Paleoenvironment, Paleoecology, Paleoanthropology Project (SACP4))
People used fire to prepare stone tools as many as 164,000 years ago, according to a new study in Science. That's more than 125,000 years earlier than previous evidence (from Europe) had placed tool firing, which makes stones easier to flake. Chemical and physical analysis of tool remains found in South Africa shows the technique was already common there 72,000 years ago.
Additional Sources
"Fire as an Engineering Tool of Early Modern Humans," Kyle S. Brown et al., Science, August 14, 2009
"Fire and Stone," John Webb and Marian Domanski, Science, August 14, 2009
"Heat Exchange from the Toucan Bill Reveals a Controllable Vascular Thermal Radiator," Glenn J. Tattersall et al., Science, July 24, 2009
"Orchid Mimics Honey Bee Alarm Pheromone in Order to Attract Hornets for Pollination," Jennifer Brodmann et al., Current Biology, August 25, 2009
"A viscosity-enhanced mechanism for biogenic ocean mixing," Kakani Katija and John O. Dabiri, Nature, July 30, 2009
"Monkeys crying wolf? Tufted capuchin monkeys use anti-predator calls to usurp resources from conspecifics," Brandon C. Wheeler, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, June 3, 2009
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