A Cross-cultural Survey of On-site Fire Use by Recent Hunter-gatherers: Implications for Research on Palaeolithic Pyrotechnology

Abstract

The ability to control fire clearly had a significant impact on human evolution, but when and how hominins developed this ability remains poorly understood. Improving our understanding of the history of hominin fire use will require not only additional fieldwork but also comparative analyses of fire use by ethnographically-documented hunter-gatherer groups. Here, we report a study that focused on the second of these tasks. In the study, we consulted ethnographic texts for a sample of 93 hunter-gatherer groups and collected data pertaining to fire use in settlements. We focused on the groups??? methods of making fire, the ways in which they used fire, and when and where they created fires. While many of the observations were in line with expectations, some were surprising. Perhaps most notably, we found that several groups did not know how to make fire and that even within some of the groups who were able to make fire, the relevant knowledge was restricted to a very small number of individuals. Another surprising finding was that many groups preferred to preserve fire rather than creating it anew, to the point that they would carry it between camps. In the final section of the paper, we discuss the implications of the survey???s findings for understanding the early archaeological record of fire use.