ion, Metaphor and Mimesis Southwest is very conscious of its own corporate ‘way of life’. A list is given on its website under the heading ‘culture’ of the desired characteristics of a Southwest person (perseverant, egalitarian, passionate), and these qualities are abstracted into the more general injunctions to be low cost and have high customer service delivery, and the mission statement talks of warmth, friendliness, individual pride and company spirit. So there are clear abstractions here that create a unity and coherence to activities across domains. Throughout this book I have shown how entanglements involve material and conceptual components. In Chapter 2 I described a pebble on a beach that was brought into different assemblies with other things depending on how it was recognized, remembered and owned. In that chapter too I described how the equipmental totality of a thing depended on the different theories about and perspectives towards it. In Chapter 3 I used the quote from Gibson that ‘an affordance points both ways, to the environment and to the observer’ (1986: 129). In Chapter 4 I noted that the maintenance of walls in the Yorkshire Dales depended on expert ideas about organic foods and recent collective nostalgia for a rural way of life. In Chapter 5 I showed how a sail boat had different entanglements, and different affordances depending on the perspectives of sailing, entertaining and protecting the ecosystem of the bay. These ideas about the boat are themselves tied to wider ideas about what is leisure and how the environment should be protected. So entanglements and affordances and functions are always tied to abstractions (ideas, thoughts, words, feelings and senses). These abstractions are hierarchical and nested as noted above, and they often cross domains so that humans seek unities, coherence, metaphor within different realms of experience. Abstractions are general and can often be applied to more than one domain of activity. Their transferability Hodder_c06.indd 120 2/3/2012 12:14:59 PM

Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things

http://tinread.usarb.md:8888/tinread/fulltext/lal/biofuel.pdf

World crop residues production and implications of its use as a biofuel

Wild Crop Relatives: Genomic and Breeding Resources

Ecologists, biogeographers, and paleobotanists have long thought that climate and soils controlled the distribution of ecosystems, with the role of fire getting only limited appreciation. Here we review evidence from different disciplines demonstrating that wildfire appeared concomitant with the origin of terrestrial plants and played an important role throughout the history of life. The importance of fire has waxed and waned in association with changes in climate and paleoatmospheric conditions. Well before the emergence of humans on Earth, fire played a key role in the origins of plant adaptations as well as in the distribution of ecosystems. Humans initiated a new stage in ecosystem fire, using it to make the Earth more suited to their lifestyle. However, as human populations have expanded their use of fire, their actions have come to dominate some ecosystems and change natural processes in ways that threaten the sustainability of some landscapes.

/pdf/a-burning-story-the-role-of-fire-in-the-history-of-life-2dlbto4ejw.pdf

A burning story: The role of fire in the history of life

Humans and their ancestors are unique in being a fire-making species, but ‘natural’ (i.e. independent of humans) fires have an ancient, geological history on Earth. Natural fires have influenced biological evolution and global biogeochemical cycles, making fire integral to the functioning of some biomes. Globally, debate rages about the impact on ecosystems of prehistoric human-set fires, with views ranging from catastrophic to negligible. Understanding of the diversity of human fire regimes on Earth in the past, present and future remains rudimentary. It remains uncertain how humans have caused a departure from ‘natural’ background levels that vary with climate change. Available evidence shows that modern humans can increase or decrease background levels of natural fire activity by clearing forests, promoting grazing, dispersing plants, altering ignition patterns and actively suppressing fires, thereby causing substantial ecosystem changes and loss of biodiversity. Some of these contemporary fire regimes cause substantial economic disruptions owing to the destruction of infrastructure, degradation of ecosystem services, loss of life, and smoke-related health effects. These episodic disasters help frame negative public attitudes towards landscape fires, despite the need for burning to sustain some ecosystems. Greenhouse gas-induced warming and changes in the hydrological cycle may increase the occurrence of large, severe fires, with potentially significant feedbacks to the Earth system. Improved understanding of human fire regimes demands: (1) better data on past and current human influences on fire regimes to enable global comparative analyses, (2) a greater understanding of different cultural traditions of landscape burning and their positive and negative social, economic and ecological effects, and (3) more realistic representations of anthropogenic fire in global vegetation and climate change models. We provide an historical framework to promote understanding of the development and diversification of fire regimes, covering the pre-human period, human domestication of fire, and the subsequent transition from subsistence agriculture to industrial economies. All of these phases still occur on Earth, providing opportunities for comparative research.

The human dimension of fire regimes on Earth

The presence of burned seeds, wood, and flint at the Acheulian site of Gesher Benot Ya'aqov in Israel is suggestive of the control of fire by humans nearly 790,000 years ago. The distribution of the site's small burned flint fragments suggests that burning occurred in specific spots, possibly indicating hearth locations. Wood of six taxa was burned at the site, at least three of which are edible--live, wild barley, and wild grape.

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/304/5671/725.full.pdf

Evidence of Hominin Control of Fire at Gesher Benot Ya`aqov, Israel

The Acheulean site of Gesher Benot Ya'aqov in the Dead Sea Rift of Israel documents hominin movements and technological development on a corridor between Africa and Eurasia. New age data place the site at 780,000 years ago (oxygen isotope stage 19), considerably older than previous estimates. The archaeological data from the site portray strong affinities with African stone tool traditions. The findings also reflect adroit technical skills and in-depth planning abilities, more advanced and complex than those of earlier archaeological occurrences in the Levant.

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/289/5481/944.full.pdf

Pleistocene milestones on the out-of-Africa corridor at Gesher Benot Ya'aqov, israel.

The Acheulian site of Gesher Benot Ya‘aqov (Israel) has revealed a unique association of edible nuts with pitted hammers and anvils. Located in the Dead Sea rift, on the boundary between the Arabian and African plates, the site dates to the Early-Middle Pleistocene, oxygen isotope stage 19. In a series of strata, seven species of nuts, most of which can be cracked open only by a hard hammer, were uncovered. Five of the species are extant terrestrial nuts, and two are aquatic nuts now extinct in the Levant. In addition, the site yielded an assemblage of pitted hammers and anvils similar in pit morphology to those used by chimpanzees and contemporary hunter–gatherers. This is the first time, to our knowledge, that a site has offered both paleobotanical and lithic evidence of plant foods eaten by early hominins and technologies used for processing these foods. The evidence also sheds light on the structure of the community: ethnographic analogies suggest that mixedgender groups may have been active on the shores of paleoLake Hula.

https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/99/4/2455.full.pdf

Nuts, nut cracking, and pitted stones at Gesher Benot Ya‘aqov, Israel

Weeds are currently present in a wide range of ecosystems worldwide. Although the beginning of their evolution is largely unknown, researchers assumed that they developed in tandem with cultivation since the appearance of agricultural habitats some 12,000 years ago. These rapidly-evolving plants invaded the human disturbed areas and thrived in the new habitat. Here we present unprecedented new findings of the presence of “proto-weeds” and small-scale trial cultivation in Ohalo II, a 23,000-year-old hunter-gatherers' sedentary camp on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, Israel. We examined the plant remains retrieved from the site (ca. 150,000 specimens), placing particular emphasis on the search for evidence of plant cultivation by Ohalo II people and the presence of weed species. The archaeobotanically-rich plant assemblage demonstrates extensive human gathering of over 140 plant species and food preparation by grinding wild wheat and barley. Among these, we identified 13 well-known current weeds mixed with numerous seeds of wild emmer, barley, and oat. This collection provides the earliest evidence of a human-disturbed environment—at least 11 millennia before the onset of agriculture—that provided the conditions for the development of "proto-weeds", a prerequisite for weed evolution. Finally, we suggest that their presence indicates the earliest, small-scale attempt to cultivate wild cereals seen in the archaeological record.

/pdf/the-origin-of-cultivation-and-proto-weeds-long-before-1ya68ml363.pdf

The Origin of Cultivation and Proto-Weeds, Long Before Neolithic Farming.

The spatial designation of discrete areas for different activities reflects formalized conceptualization of a living space. The results of spatial analyses of a Middle Pleistocene Acheulian archaeological horizon (about 750,000 years ago) at Gesher Benot Ya'aqov, Israel, indicate that hominins differentiated their activities (stone knapping, tool use, floral and faunal processing and consumption) across space. These were organized in two main areas, including multiple activities around a hearth. The diversity of human activities and the distinctive patterning with which they are organized implies advanced organizational skills of the Gesher Benot Ya'aqov hominins.

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/326/5960/1677.full.pdf

Yoel Melamed

Papers

Evidence of Hominin Control of Fire at Gesher Benot Ya`aqov, Israel

Pleistocene milestones on the out-of-Africa corridor at Gesher Benot Ya'aqov, israel.

Nuts, nut cracking, and pitted stones at Gesher Benot Ya‘aqov, Israel

The Origin of Cultivation and Proto-Weeds, Long Before Neolithic Farming.

Spatial Organization of Hominin Activities at Gesher Benot Ya’aqov, Israel