Reply to Sandgathe et al.: Neandertal use of fire

Abstract

Sandgathe et al. (1) agree that fire was not a requisite technology for hominin expansion into northern latitudes, but they suggest that habitual use of fire appeared later than stated in our paper (2), only near the end of the Late Pleistocene. They stress that, despite the growing number of Neandertal sites with solid evidence for fire use, there is also a large number of sites without such evidence (1). Based primarily on their extrapolation of data from two recently excavated Middle Paleolithic sites in the Dordogne (France), they argue that the sequences from many Neandertal sites associated with cold environments do not have evidence for fire throughout them (1). They assume that this challenges whether Neandertals were obligate fire users and proficient at making fire.