The Origin of Controlled Fire Use

The development of control over fire is widely seen as a watershed in human evolution. Depending upon the accepted date for this process, the consequences of the human adoption of fire as a tool for cooking, warmth, protection from predators, and countless other uses are profound. Yet despite indications from anatomical, genetic, and primate data that human dependence upon fire evolved early (~1.7 million years ago), critical examinations of the evidence for fire in the archaeological record indicate not only that its origins are significantly later (~1.0 million), but that its use, for all time periods prior to approximately 45,000 years ago, was only sporadic. This has led to the hypothesis that human ancestors previous to this period, including the Neanderthals of Late Pleistocene Europe, were not obligate fire users and did not have the ability to make fire but only to use the fire they found on the landscape resulting from natural lighting strikes. This issue could have contributed to the replacement of European Neanderthal populations by modern humans from Africa at this time. The multidisciplinary team created by Dr. Gilbert Tostevin & Dr. Gilliane Monnier, both of the University of Minnesota, along with colleagues in Montenegro, Serbia, Spain, France, Canada, and Israel, will test this hypothesis by studying the frequency and context of fire use throughout one of the longest archaeological sequences in Europe, at Crvena Stijena Rock Shelter in Montenegro. This project trains 20 students from all over the Balkans in high-resolution archaeological, geological, and cultural heritage 3D digital methods. Montenegro in particular needs to train a generation of archaeologists, since they lost their only archaeology faculty (in Belgrade, Serbia) when they became independent. The project will both train professional archaeologists as well as engage in public outreach events, such as the yearly Dani Nauka ('Days of Science') events run by the Montenegrin government.

Investigating Neanderthal control of fire with extant archaeological data is difficult, since geological processes within sites frequently erase the physical evidence of fire (through the dissolution of the ash, charcoal, and burnt sediment which make up hearths). As such, it is hard to distinguish between a real absence of fire and the mere absence of evidence. Newer techniques recently made available to archaeological scientists, however, are able to recognize microscopic evidence for fire even when it is no longer visible macroscopically. This multidisciplinary project is designed around the application of these new techniques for the analysis of the context of Neanderthal use of fire against the 40,000 year occupation of the site before the appearance of modern humans in the region.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.