World archaeology and global change: did our ancestors ignite the Ice Age?

The widespread belief that the development of modern science and technology since the Renaissance is responsible for anthropogenic global climate change has important ideological overtones as it underestimates the fundamental idiosyncrasy of cultural organization. Large‐scale anthropogenic disturbance of the natural order began in prehistoric times, probably more than a million years ago, and the domestication of fire was the major cause of this change. Early systematic burning has amplified the savanna landscape, particularly in Africa, and large‐scale climatic change is a likely result. Recent estimates suggest that the age of Homo, of the first stone tools and of the shift to cooler and drier conditions at the beginning of the Pleistocene, virtually coincide at 2.4 to 2.5 Ma. We raise the hypothesis that this was also the age of fire domestication, causing large‐scale amplification of the savanna landscape. We propose that this early human interference may have been an important factor leading to the climate destabilization characteristic of the Pleistocene. We indicate that African Lake deposits as well as the deep sea sedimentary record around the affected continents, e.g. in the Angola Basin, provide a more reliable record of early anthropogenic global change than the continental sediments. Dedicated stratigraphical research of the former deposits, using biomolecular archaeological approaches, is likely to provide the evidence by which our hypothesis may be falsified. We particularly advocate the use of immunological techniques as they reveal macromolecular structure rather than sheer composition.