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Finding the First Fires with Microscopes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2018

Stephen W. Carmichael
Stephen W. Carmichael*
Affiliation:
Mayo Clinic
*
stephen.carmichael@mayo.edu

Extract

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Coal is remnants of plant matter that were compressed and held at a high temperature for eons. However, if plants are charred first, they become hard and brittle, and may resist compression. Under appropriate circumstances, anatomic detail can be elegantly retained. Ian Glasspool, Dianne Edwards, and Lindsey Axe have performed detailed studies on plant fossils recovered in England, near the Welsh border, that can be considered to be evidence for the earliest wildfire yet described on our planet. They examined a series of mesofossils, about one millimeter in size, which required microscopic study.

It is well known that chemical and structural changes occur to organic tissues during charring. This can mean that charcoal is resistant to decay and compression and it is also more reflective than non-charred material. Glasspool et al. used incident light and scanning electron microscopy to reveal 3-dimensional cellular detail of the specimens. Additional specimens were embedded and polished for reflectance microscopy. The results indicated that the specimens were charcoal.

Type
Research Article
Information
Microscopy Today , Volume 12 , Issue 6 , November 2004 , pp. 3 - 7
Copyright
Copyright © Microscopy Society of America 2004

Footnotes

1

The author gratefully acknowledges Mrs. Lindsey Axe and Dr. Naama Goren-Inbar for reviewing this article.

References

2 Glasspool, I.J., Edwards, D., and Axe, L., Charcoal in the Silurian as evidence for the earliest wildfire, Geology 32:381–383, 2004 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a more detailed account see Edwards, D. and Axe, L., Anatomical evidence in the detection of the earliest wildfires, Palaios 19:113–128, 2004 2.0.CO;2>CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Goren-Inbar, N., Alperson, N., Kislev, M., Simchoni, O., Melamed, Y., Ben-Nun, A., and Werker, E., Evidence of hominin control of fire at Gesher Benot Ya’aqov, Israel, Science 304:725–727, 2004 Google ScholarPubMed.