According to an Israeli study, an explosion of fires 8,000 years ago forever changed the fate of humanity

A new study by a researcher at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem suggests that a series of catastrophic fires forced communities to abandon their nomadic lifestyle of hunter-gatherers and become farmers. Professor Amos Frumkin, author of the study published this month in the Journal of Soils and Sediments, analyzed deposits of coal, soil and minerals in different climatic regions of Israel. His research points to a series of fires caused by int…