Was the Emergence of Home Bases and Domestic Fire a Punctuated Event? A Review of the Middle Pleistocene Record in Eurasia

Abstract

The concept of a home-based land use strategy is fundamental for studying recent and prehistoric foraging populations. A proposed datum for the emergence of this behavior is set during later Middle Pleistocene times, around 400–350 kya, and temporally linked with the first established evidence for domestic fire making. Precise causes for this dual appearance remain obscure. Surveying the known Paleolithic record and contexts serves to identify possible factors and processes leading to this development. The emphasis here is on fire technology, particularly domestic fire making and uses, and fire's relationship with home base sensu lato characteristics, as contrasted with a previous land use system that reflects earlier primate patterns. Intentional bush and grassland burning could be components of this home base and domestic fire system. The issue of domestic fire and home base at Locality 1 in Zhoukoudian Cave is evaluated from the perspective of contemporaneous hominid behavior in Eurasia and Africa.

Pleistocene occupation of New Guinea's highland and subalpine environments

“…It also suggests that early modern humans could actively adapt new and unfamiliar environments to their purposes from at least 35ka as well as modify their behaviour to those environments. Hominids have been able to control fire for several hundred thousand years (Goren-Inbar et al 2004), though the earliest claims of deliberate use of fire as a landscape modification tool before their appearance in Sahul remain weak (McBrearty and Brooks 2000;Rolland 2004). The Kosipe evidence provides, at before 35ka, the earliest strong evidence for deliberate landscape modification by humans.…”

Humans in the Hoxnian: habitat, context and fire use at Beeches Pit, West Stow, Suffolk, UK

“…It has even been argued that the apparent absence of fire use in the early Middle Pleistocene, at sites such as Boxgrove, may be linked to a major advance in human social and intellectual capabilities, which did not take effect in northern Europe until about 400 kyr (cf. Dunbar, 1998;Rolland, 2004). Despite these arguments, there is compelling evidence for controlled use of fire at Beeches Pit (Hallos, 2004;Gowlett et al, 2005;Gowlett, 2006).…”

“…Wymer, 1999) might give an entirely false impression of the distribution of early human populations and the range of their activities (but see Ashton et al,this issue,. For this reason Beeches Pit is of particular value, since it provides a rare glimpse of an interglacial area of focused activities (perhaps a 'home-base' sensu Rolland, 2004) that was not in the bottom of a large river valley.…”

Earliest fire in Africa: towards the convergence of archaeological evidence and the cooking hypothesis

“…Making comparison with other cultural traits, we might expect intensification in fire-use over a long period. Rolland (2000Rolland ( , 2004, de Lumley (2006) and Roebroeks and Villa (2011) all argue for major change around 400,000 years ago. If so, following our arguments, such major change is likely to represent not the beginning of fire use in the north, but a new flexibility in its maintenance and transport.…”