Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden University, 2300 RA Leiden, The Netherlands.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2011 Mar 29;108(13):5209-14. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1018116108. Epub 2011 Mar 14.
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.
人类控制火的时间是一个备受争议的问题，有人声称在 160 万年前的非洲，早期人类就经常用火。这些说法并非没有争议，但大多数考古学家都认为，人类对非洲以外地区的殖民，特别是对欧洲等地区的殖民，这些地区的温度有时会降至冰点以下，确实与火的使用有关。我们对欧洲证据的回顾表明，早期人类在没有习惯性使用火的情况下进入了高纬度地区。直到大约 30 万至 40 万年前，火才成为人类技术组合的重要组成部分。也正是从中石器时代后半期开始，我们可以观察到尼安德特人在制作柄材方面具有惊人的火工知识。在整个更新世晚期，有大量用火证据的遗址数量增加，这表明欧洲尼安德特人对火的管理与旧石器时代晚期的群体所记录的管理方式相似。
