In Monday's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Early Edition, paleontologists Wil Roebroeks and Paola Villa reported on their examination of the evidence for the habitual use of fire in Lower Paleolithic sites and concluded ... there isn't any.
Camp Fire at Pitt Island, British Columbia, Canada. Photo by Sam Beebe, EcoTrust
Roebroeks and Villa don't argue that the evidence for very early use of fire doesn't exist--at sites such as Gesher Benot Ya'aqov (780,000 bp) and (possibly) Zhoukoudien--but that the use was opportunistic rather than controlled (that is, prehistoric residents couldn't start their own fire from scratch).
Roebroeks and Villa point out the large number of Middle Paleolithic open-air sites in cold climatic areas where people might have needed fire to stay warm but do not include evidence of it at all. They don't dismiss evidence of heat-treated stone tools or charred bones from African sites such as Chesowanja (Kenya) and Koobi Fora FxJj20 (Tanzania), some as early as 1.6 million years ago. Instead, they argue that hominids such as Homo erectus did not have controlled use of fire, but used it when they ran into it--closer to the equator where lightning strikes and thus natural fires would have been more common.
Roebroek and Villa note that beginning about 400,000-300,000 years ago, strong evidence for the use and reuse of fire including the hafting of stone tools is found in several Middle Paleolithic caves and open air sites. Stone-lined hearths are noted first in the later half of the Middle Paleolithic at such sites as Abric Romani (Catalonia) and La Folie (France) and Ksiecia Jozefa (Poland). This evidence implies the use of heat treatment of birch bark pitch to create a hafting material, and that both neanderthals and early modern humans were practicing such modern behaviors at the time.
This paper is most interesting for the considerations of the blossoming of behavioral modernity and how we define that. Behavioral modernity is a suite of behaviors that scholars have agreed are characteristics of cognition approaching modern humans. Control of fire is one of those behaviors, along with specialized hunting skills and stone tool making and intentional burials, among other things.
Sources and Further Reading
- The Control of Fire
- What is behavioral modernity?
- Abric Romani (Catalonia)
- Gesher Benot Ya'aqov (Israel)
- Zhoukoudien (China)
Roebroeks W, and Villa P. 2011. On the earliest evidence for habitual use of fire in Europe. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Early Edition: 1-6. Open Access, so read it yourself!
Comments
So are they or you saying that they were intelligent enough to understand how heat treating rocks could assist them in the lithic reduction of certain types of stone when making tools but not intelligent enough to actually start a fire when the need was apparent? If so the heat treatment of stone for lithic reduction could have only been used when the suitable stone and an opportunistic natural fire were found at the same time. COME ON NOW, Ya’ll have got to be kidding right? It is not that hard to imagine that while banging a flint rock against another one that it could have produced a spark that may have caused a little smoke in some nearby grassy tinder. Even ya’ll know what they say, “where there is smoke”……. FLINT TOOLS! DUH! sorry, couldn’t control the “inner snark”…..rick d.
Well, I’m not actually saying anything, but… think about this, Rick. We’re not talking humans, we’re talking Homo erectus, and they are doing just fine in cold climates without fire. How did they do that?
I don’t think anybody’s saying Homo erectus were too dumb to know how to make fire—but they are saying they were cold adapted so they didn’t need it.
C’mon guy. Not everything is a challenge to the higher abilities of stone making man. It’s interesting to think about: when did behavioral modernity happen? What was the spark? (pun intended)
It is quite possible making and control of fire arose and was lost again many, many, times of the long period of Homo erectus’ time on earth. Fire did not just “happen” along with “behavioral modernity” and then continue uninterrupted from a single place and point in time. I would not place too much emphasis on overall cognitive capabilities based on use of fire until many more data are available. Also, it would seem to require much more technical skill, knowledge and sheer luck to harvest a live lightning wild fire and bring it to a site for temporary management than to make a fire by accident while tool-making. What about food preparation, protection from predators, lithic material preparation- three great reasons for fire in addition to staying warm?
You say :”but they are saying they were cold adapted so they didn’t need it…” What would be the reasons for them promoting a “cold adapted” reasoning over a reasoning that early man would seek to ensure he had fire… fire has been on this planet longer than man.. ???
Very interesting as insight and as a conundrum…added to which is the likelihood of several different species of human ranging about, presumably with adaptations unique to their populations. I’m not surprised that humans, when in what seems to be a relatively pre-social state, relied on fire in ways that did not necessarily create much unmistakable evidence of their having big fires repeatedly in selected and often used places.
Thanks for keeping us informed. Cheers.
That is an interesting remark, Doug. Could you be more precise about uses of fire that “did not necessarily create much evidence”? Roebroeks’ and Villa’s database is very rich, detailed and well scrutinized. Could they have missed a pattern that have been produced by the “pre-social” uses of fire you’re talking about? And how would you define “pre-social” in such a setting?
Jan Kolen