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On the earliest evidence for habitual use of fire in Europe
Edited* by Erik Trinkaus, Washington University, St. Louis, MO, and approved February 8, 2011 (received for review December 4, 2010)

Abstract
The timing of the human control of fire is a hotly debated issue, with claims for regular fire use by early hominins in Africa at ∼1.6 million y ago. These claims are not uncontested, but most archaeologists would agree that the colonization of areas outside Africa, especially of regions such as Europe where temperatures at time dropped below freezing, was indeed tied to the use of fire. Our review of the European evidence suggests that early hominins moved into northern latitudes without the habitual use of fire. It was only much later, from ∼300,000 to 400,000 y ago onward, that fire became a significant part of the hominin technological repertoire. It is also from the second half of the Middle Pleistocene onward that we can observe spectacular cases of Neandertal pyrotechnological knowledge in the production of hafting materials. The increase in the number of sites with good evidence of fire throughout the Late Pleistocene shows that European Neandertals had fire management not unlike that documented for Upper Paleolithic groups.
Footnotes
- ↵1To whom correspondence may be addressed. E-mail: w.roebroeks{at}arch.leidenuniv.nl or villap{at}colorado.edu.
Author contributions: W.R. and P.V. designed research; performed research; analyzed data; and wrote the paper.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
↵*This Direct Submission article had a prearranged editor.
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1018116108/-/DCSupplemental.
Freely available online through the PNAS open access option.
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- Anthropology