This could be the oldest evidence of fire-making | National Geographic share.google/REz05TZFYcA55Iy…

Neandertals mastered fire-making tools 400,000 years ago sciencenews.org/article/nean…

🚨New paper alert!🚨 Earliest known instance of pyrite ca. 400 kya at Barnham (UK), in layers with strong evidence of fire use, in an area with no naturally occurring pyrite nodules, together strongly suggest these pre-Neandertal peoples were making fire! nature.com/articles/s41586-0…

The most telling signs would be: 1. Geopolymer binder (amorphous/isotropic) looks different from natural calcite cement. 2. Lack of interlocking grain contacts; natural diagenetic features, stratification, and fossil orientation. 3. Unnatural distribution/size of voids.

Could ancient Egyptians do this? Sure, they were smart. Did they? Maybe to a limited degree, I don't really know. For ALL the blocks? I'm skeptical but happy to be proven wrong. Could geologists (now and in the future) tell the difference? I'm thin section, almost certainly!

Probably easier, cheaper, and safer (easy to break) to send samples to a petrographic thin section preparation service (Google it), rather than buy a couple of rock saws, epoxy, glass slides, polishing equipment, etc. You'll also need a petrographic 🔬 to look at them properly.

Thanks for sharing! A great example of how science should work 👍 Not always right (sometimes wrong for the right reasons), but ultimately self-correcting as accumulated evidence points the way towards the best explanation for a phenomenon. Thin sections FTW! 💪🤓🔬🪨 #parsimony

U-Pb dating of inclusions, electron spin resonance (ESR), optically stimulated luminescence (OSL). Assuming quartz crystals would actually form under these conditions (unlikely), any these dating methods should be able to distinguish between modern and ancient quartz.

Any geologist worth their salt (teehee, natron...salt...get it? 🤭) could tell the difference between real stone and artificial stone 💁

Weak stress birefringence in (hardened) glass can appear as a patchy pattern of bright or colored areas, often concentrated near edges, but since it's amorphous (i.e., no crystals), it will not exhibit the clean, systematic extinction typical of anisotropic minerals like quartz.

Easy to prove: Make a thin section of a piece a stone you think is artificial and stick it under a petrographic microscope using cross polarized light. Turning the stage, quartz alternates black/gray/white (anisotropic), while amorphous glass will always appear black (isotropic).

Yours is a strange existence, Flint 😵‍💫 Probably not what you signed up for 😅

Please sign the #petition against giant budget cuts to #HigherEducation in The #Netherlands! #academia #research campagnes.degoedezaak.org/ca…

@MW_hominin's winning smile is featuring very prominently between talks at #ESHE2024 😁😁😁

Wasn't expecting it to end up in publishing limbo, but lesson learned 😅

🔥🚨#NewPaperAlert!🚨🔥 After being buried on the editor's desk for over a year, my manuscript on experimentally testing the utility of manganese dioxide powder as a #fire-starting aid has seen the light of day! 😅 #Neanderthals #archeology link.springer.com/article/10…

D'oh!😖 *hold the line 😒

This is a fun read 😁 Way to not only only the line, but gain back some ground for #archaeology, @FlintDibble! 💪