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Investigating variability in the frequency of fire use in the archaeological record of Late Pleistocene Europe

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Abstract

The primary focus of this paper is to examine the extent to which the pattern of Neandertal fire use in southwest France occurred at other times and places during the European Late Pleistocene. In previous studies, both direct and indirect data showed a pattern of limited fire use in layers associated with colder intervals in MIS 4 and 3 and more frequent evidence of fire use in those from warmer periods in MIS 5. One possible explanation for this pattern is that Neandertals were harvesting fire from naturally occurring fires. To test the uniformity of this pattern in other geographic regions and climatic conditions, we expanded our analysis to a wider range of paleoenvironmental contexts beyond those found in southwest France, which included new data from five Middle Paleolithic sites and one Upper Paleolithic site. The subsequent analyses of burned flints suggested that Neandertal use of fire was not frequent when climate regimes were colder, and was more variable and frequent during warmer periods. In fact, the study sites did not show abundant evidence for fire use, especially during colder climatic intervals. Such a result provides strong support for the argument of Dibble et al. about the contextuality of the pattern of fire use during Late Pleistocene Europe. We suggest that environmental variables, such as local climate and geographic contexts, influenced the pattern of fire use during the European Late Pleistocene regardless of the marine isotope stages represented at these sites.

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Acknowledgements

We wish to acknowledge the significant contributions of the late Harold L. Dibble to the study of fire use by European Neandertals. His ideas motivated our undertaking additional studies of fire use at late Pleistocene sites across Europe. This research was made possible by the considerable support of the Max Planck Institute, Leipzig, Germany. Thanks also to Dr. Marcel Weiss for his helpful advice on selecting the museum collections in Germany and the Czech Republic, and to Dr. Mareike C. Stahlschmidt for her valuable insights on the mechanism of heat-fracture on lithics. Many thanks to the following scholars for providing A. A. with research resources and access to the lithic collections used in this study: Dr. Thorsten Uthmeier, Dr. Andreas Maier, and Sabine Kadler for the Sesselfelsgrotte collections held in Erlangen University, Erlangen, Germany; Dr. Marie-Helene Moncel for the Abri du Maras lithic collections held in the Department of Prehistory, Institute of Human Palaeontology, Paris, France; Drs. María Gema Chacón and Amèlia Bargalló for the Abric Romani collections held at the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution (IPHES), Tarragona, Spain; Dr. Petr Neruda and Dr. Zdeñka Nerudová for the Kulna collections held at the Historical Department of Moravian Museum (Brno, Czech Republic); and Dr. Laurent Chiotti for the Abri Pataud lithic collections held in the National Museum of Prehistory at Les Eyzies, France. In addition, we would like to thank Dr. George M. Leader for his insightful feedback. This paper is based on research funded by the University of Pennsylvania Anthropology Department Summer Field Funds, Penn Museum summer fieldwork funds, and the Kolb Fellowship (Greenwalt funds) to A. A.

Funding

This study was supported by the University of Pennsylvania, Department of Anthropology Summer Field Funds, Penn Museum Summer Fieldwork funds, and the Kolb Fellowship (Greenwalt funds) to A.A.

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  1. Department of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania, 3260 South St, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, USA

    Aylar Abdolahzadeh, Theodore G. Schurr, Deborah I. Olszewski & Harold L. Dibble

  2. Department of Human Evolution, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Deutscher Platz 6, 04103, Leipzig, Germany

    Shannon P. McPherron

  3. Department of Archaeology, Simon Fraser University, 8888 University Dr, Burnaby, BC, V5A 1S6, Canada

    Dennis M. Sandgathe

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Abdolahzadeh, A., McPherron, S., Sandgathe, D. et al. Investigating variability in the frequency of fire use in the archaeological record of Late Pleistocene Europe. Archaeol Anthropol Sci 14, 62 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12520-022-01526-1

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