Wildfire as catastrophism? hmmmm...maybe I have a different perspective on that one....
I spent last week at the World Congress of Soil Scientists meeting in Philadelphia. In one of the Soil Micromorphology sessions, we were treated to a remarkable presentation by a French scientist named Marie-Agnes Courty. She has spent about 20 years looking at shocked quartz (and other shocked minerals) and charcoal in soils around the Mediterranean. Her work strongly supports that of Mike Baillie (of Exodus to Arthur fame); she finds a soil layer dating to approximately 2350BC that is full of evidence of meteorite impact and resultant wildfires. She has identified an impact site on the edge of Antarctica just south of South Africa, but from the scatter of shocked minerals, it is apparent that there was also an impact site somewhere in the Mediterranean area.
She has also studied minerals and charcoal from Mousterian culture sites in Spain. Her findings from this study astounded me. Working in sites that showed more-or-less continuous habitation by Neanderthals, she found that charcoal deposits in caves (from hearths) were sporadic, and occurred only during times where there was evidence of forest fire in the surrounding open areas. From this, she infers that Neanderthals WERE NOT ABLE TO MAKE FIRE, BUT COULD ONLY COLLECT IT WHEN IT OCCURRED NATURALLY. If her assumption is correct, it would go a long way in explaining why Neanderthals were outcompeted by modern humans!!
