Archaeologists and geologists confirmed that traces of the ancestors of people in Vanderverk cave in South Africa, including workers of labor and signs of the use of fire, are the oldest among those found in cave settlements. The article of researchers was published in the QUATERNARY SCIENCE Reviews magazine.
The team analyzed a sedimentary layer with a thickness of 2.5 meters, containing stone tools of labor, the remains of animals and the remains of fire, using two methods of dating burials. One of them was based on paleomagnetism, when the direction of the magnetic field of the Earth affects the magnetization of clay particles in the sedimentary layer. The second method was measured by the ratio of isotopes in quartz particles pointing to the time when the sand hit the cave.
Scientists have successfully established an approximate date of the transition from Olduva culture tools (mainly sharp flakes and chopped) to early manual axes. It happened more than one million years ago.
Olduva culture arose 2.6 million years ago and disappeared a million years ago. Dating has shown that the age of stone tools found in Vantrevert reaches 1.8 million years, which is currently beating a record among the cave artifacts belonging to this culture. Traces of intentional breeding of fires (burnt bones, ash, burned stones) are dating in one million years. Other famous archaeological samples pointing to early use of fire have still been discovered only under the open sky.