Neanderthals were nifty at controlling fire about 400,000 years ago, archaeologists have claimed, adding fuel to the debate whether our distant cousins were dimwitted brutes or a bit smart.
A team of archaeologists, who studied scores of ancient archaeological sites in Europe, said they have strong evidence that suggest long-term fire control by Neanderthals.
“Until now, many scientists have thought Neanderthals had some fires but did not have continuous use of fire,” study author Paola Villa, of the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History, said in a paper published in the journal The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“We were not expecting to find a record of so many Neanderthal sites exhibiting such good evidence of the sustained use of fire over time,” Villa said.
Neanderthals are thought to have evolved in Europe roughly 400,000 to 500,000 years ago and went extinct about 30,000 years ago.
The pre-historic humans, who ranged over much of Europe and stretched to Central Asia, were stockier than the modern humans and even shared the same terrain for a time. Modern humans are believed to have began migrating out of Africa to Europe some 40,000 years ago.
According to archaeologists, the emergence of stone tool manufacturing and the control of fire are the two hallmark events in the technological evolution of early humans. While experts agree the origins of stone tools date back at least 2.5 million years in Africa, the origin of fire control has been a prolonged debate.
For their research, Villa along with co-author Professor Wil Roebroeks of Leiden University in the Netherlands visited dozens of the Neanderthal excavation sites in Europe, combed libraries throughout Europe and the US, spoke to experts who were involved in excavations. —PTI