![]() in Australia and the Americas, and debates on the role of indigenous populations in environmental restoration. That study is very topical at the moment because of the problematic increase in fires e.g. Moving beyond the scale of campsites, Leiden archaeologists also put on the map the worldwide use of fire in shaping cultural landscapes by hunter-gatherers (“fire-stick farming”), in a systematic review of ethnographic sources that resulted in a Current Anthropology paper and an open-access database. ![]() The team invested considerably in studying how fire may have been produced in the deep past, again in a multi-proxy approach (that resulted in a 2018 study providing the first evidence of fire production by Neanderthals. Changes in fire-related skills and technology must have altered human interactions with fire dramatically. In addition, using fire does not entail its production: wildfires provide a source of burnt foods or flames, and a flame can be maintained for long periods without the use of fire-starting tools. We also conducted ethnohistorical studies of cultural and biological “ fire-free” ways of staying warm in seasonal environments. Teaming up with Jac Aarts and other scientists from Wageningen University, we showed that, surprisingly, Neanderthals were better at dealing with the toxic products of smoke than modern humans are, opening up a whole new line of research into the possible implications of fire use for human health. We have also used ancient genomes to track human adaptations to fire use, to obtain “archaeology-free” data about our relationship with fire. This developing toolkit forms an essential bridge between the archaeological record and inferences about how fire use shaped human cultural behaviour.Ĭover of Molecular Biology and Evolution, featuring the article on Neanderthal resistance to smoke toxins. A proof of concept of this approach was recently published in a multidisciplinary study of 40,000 to 20,000 years old hearths from the Abri Pataud rock shelter at Les Eyzies (France), which pioneered the retrieval of ancient DNA from sediments in this context. the fuels used and foods prepared therein. hold the promise to be turned into a “toolkit” that can be used at archaeological sites of all ages, to establish the character of fire traces in great detail (natural or anthropogenic?), and to identify the former functions of fireplaces, e.g. To address this, Leiden archaeologists initiated a series of laboratory experiments designed to study the taphonomic history of heated materials (what happens to heated bone and stone once they become buried in sediments) to identify the best scientific methods to reconstruct former heating conditions. However, the archaeological record is notoriously fragmentary, fire use by mobile foragers leaves few traces, and those of much earlier fire use may simply have not been preserved. This would imply that early humans moved into Eurasia almost one million years before starting to use fire on a regular, archaeologically visible, basis. more than 1-1.5 million years later than usually acknowledged. Ancient fire useĪ 2011 PNAS study concluded that fire became a fixed part of the human technological repertoire relatively recently, “only” about 400,000 years ago, i.e. In the last decade, Leiden archaeologists of the Human Origins group have addressed these issues in a variety of ways, in research that is still ongoing. Fire gave humans a means to increase the productivity of their habitats by burning, over time transforming their environments into cultural landscapes and impacting “System Earth” long before the Anthropocene.ĭespite the field’s general agreement that pyrotechnology had a significant impact on the cultural evolution of humankind, our understanding of the origins and development of fire use and its role in humankind’s cultural evolution is very limited, blurred by strong disagreements over its chronology and its impact on socio-cultural aspects of human life and environments. Fire also came with costs, as hominins had to collect fuel to be brought to a central place, and individuals had to work together to profit from fire. Fire extended the length of the day and impacted the character of social interactions, as is well-documented through ethnographic studies of the contents of fireside conversations, which include the sharing of stories and myths. Fire control brought many advantages: it afforded humans protection against predators and cold, and substantially increased the range of edible foods and the energy that could be extracted from them through cooking. ![]() The use of fire is a defining characteristic of the human lineage, with pyrotechnology being one of the most powerful tools developed during human evolution.
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