The Chinese Academy of Sciences. At https://phys.org/news/2025-06-carbon-reveals-evidence-extensive-human.html … Basically, evidence of landscape fires via the pyrogenic carbon record from a sediment core in the East China Sea. Not necessarily anything to do with humans. However, don’t spoil a good story, as they say. These guys have to get published and humans trashing the environment is very popular.
The evidence is that there was a notable increase in fire activity around 50,000 years ago. This Chinese evidence aligns with heightened evidence of landscape fires in Europe, SE Asia, and Papua New Guinea at the same point in time. The assumption is that humans were responsible for the increase – on the basis Out of Africa theory claims modern humans migrated out of Africa between 70,000 and 50,000 years ago. Naughty boys. We may however wonder how much western input was involved in order to get published in a western journal.
We are further told that modern humans, those Out of Africa, replaced ancient populations around the world. Why would that be – in such a rapid fashion. It seems the focus of the article is fully onboard with the western paradigm of Out of Africa, as opposed to the Chinese view of their own origins. The claim is that the fire activity coincides with the rapid spread of Homo sapiens, entirely hypothetical, as a result of an increase in population. This last point might be the Achilles heel. The idea is that use of fire escalated as temperatures plunged during the Late Glacial Maximum.
The study could be divided into two parts as the sediment core appears to be recording landscape fires rather than human hearths. It does involve considerable detail on the pyrogenic carbon record and is worth reading for that. The human element appears to be included for reasons outside the original research. Perhaps it was an attempt to make the findings more interesting to a reading public. See https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2500042122 … but what the study blatantly ignores, or the western input, is that 50,000 years ago roughly corresponds with the Laschamp Event. This involved a geomagnetic reversal which realigned itself at a later date. More importantly, it involved a mass die-off of animals and the apparent disappearance of Neanderthals and Denisovans. The landscape fires should be seen in that context – as part of a major catastrophic event in the natural world, possibly involving a storm of meteorites. Hence, contrary to the claim there was a rapid increase in human population there was quite the opposite – a collapse in population numbers. In the aftermath we have the modern humans who are supposed to have miraculously migrated out of Africa and colonised the world, replacing everyone that was already inhabiting the far flung regions such as China.