People from the ice age were real “pyrotechnics”

However, there will be a research team with Austrian participation in the magazine “Geoarcheology” with the analysis of fireplaces from the climax of the last ice age in contemporary Ukraine. According to this, there were good pyrotechnicians at the time who knew how to use the “expensive” fire.

The researchers discovered that the groups of the hunter collectors mainly used spruce wood as fuel, which optimally burned and reached temperatures of more than 600 degrees Celsius. Bot stays in the fireplaces, even traces of even higher temperatures.

It is unclear whether these bones and fat also served as fuel, but the knowledge of the efficient use of fire was clearly available.

Make fire complex and “expensive”
Despite this knowledge, fuel in the bare steppe was scarce: trees probably only grew along the Dnister river, otherwise grasses and bushes formed the landscape. That is why making fire was complex and “expensive”. Fire can therefore not be central to survive. Meat could have been stored in cold water, even without fire drying, freezing or storing, as is still practiced in arctic cultures.

Jewelry and bone remains found
The site indicates that people have regularly returned to this place to use their resources in a targeted way. In addition to the fireplaces, archaeologists also found pierced jewelry made of amber and zoo, as well as countless bones, especially reindeer and horses.

Smarts on a bad skull show that valuable pieces of meat such as the tongue were selected in a targeted way and were probably prepared by the fire – a sign of the conscious, economic treatment of the scarce agents in this ice -time environment.