Human Complexity in Paleolithic China
“A new study reveals that humans were extensively using fire to modify landscapes as far back as 50,000 years ago. That’s at least 10,000 years earlier than previously believed. Scientists uncovered this clue in a 300,000-year-old sediment core extracted from the East China Sea.
The core contained fossilized charcoal, microscopic remnants of plant matter burned but not fully consumed. Known as pyrogenic carbon, these particles drifted into the sea via rivers over tens of thousands of years. They serve as an enduring record of fire on land.” ZME Science, 2025.
The question remains: why was a successful hunter/gatherer suddenly, in many parts of the world, driven to make such enormous changes in their landscape? ” Recent studies analyzing pyrogenic carbon (charred plant remains) in marine sediment cores show a rapid, continent-wide increase in fire activity starting about 50,000 years ago across East Asia, Europe, Southeast Asia, and Australia. This major shift indicates that human management and utilization of fire was already widespread long before the Last Glacial Maximum”. Chinese Academy of Sciences, 2025.
In Europe, the middle of the last Ice Age was going on and there is no current evidence to show humans in the Americas at that time.
In Africa, such massive land management may have been going on at least 40,000 years, perhaps longer. (Smithsonian Magazine, May 6, 2021; PNAS, 2011, Archibald et al).
Was population growth involved, greater communication between groups, “network effects”? Had they gone from passive fire use in camps to making the landscape open, more accessible, less dangerous, open up forests, attract grazers to new growth? The fact that it happens around the same time globally suggests connections of some kind still to be worked out.