Identifying 1 Mya Fire in Wonderwerk Cave with Micromorphology and Fourier-Transform Infrared Microspectroscopy
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
The role of fire in the evolution of humans is an important yet unanswered question in palaeoanthropology, but there is a striking lack of archaeological evidence for the presence or absence of anthropogenic fire-use by early hominins. This is partially due to the difficulty of identifying fire residues, such as wood ash. I demonstrated that Fourier Transform Infrared Microspectroscopy integrated with micromorphological analysis can distinguish microscopic amounts of pyrogenic calcite which include wood ash, from non-pyrogenic calcites. The ν3 (CO3) peak, an absorption of energy by one of the three C-O bonds, is quantifiably more narrow in pyrogenic calcites. With the protocol, I evaluated potential evidence of anthropogenic fire at 1 Mya in Wonderwerk Cave, a South African archaeological site. The results confirmed the earlier identification of ashed plant remains in Stratum 10, thus supporting the association of fire and anthropogenic activity in Wonderwerk Cave in the Earlier Stone Age.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it