Fire-Free Hominin Strategies for Coping with Cool Winter Temperatures in North-Western Europe from Before 800,000 to Circa 400,000 Years Ago
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There is no consensus on the chronology of fire use, with suggestions ranging from earliest use by Homo erectus\n1.8 mya to relatively recent Anatomically Modern Humans. While it is widely agreed that fire would have been\nof great assistance in moving into areas with a temperate climate, early sites from middle latitudes across Eurasia\nlack convincing evidence for fire use before about 400,000 years ago. It is not clear whether this represents a real\npattern, or a limitation to past research methods and survival. Establishing a firm chronology for the use of fire requires\nrefined interpretation of fire residues at early sites. An alternative approach, taking the pattern (provisionally)\nas real, is to investigate how hominins could have solved important survival problems at middle latitudes\nwithout using fire. This article addresses strategies for thermoregulation in the absence of fire in conditions experienced\nby hominins in north-west Europe before 400,000 years ago. Four main hypotheses are proposed, involving\nstrategies based primarily on 1) winter fur and subcutaneous fat, 2) hibernation, 3) enhanced heat production, and\n4) a combination of cultural insulation particularly clothing and insulative baby carriers with enhanced heat production.\nGiven the trade-offs of these strategies, I will consider their plausibility for the early occupants of Europe,\nand discuss how the most plausible strategies could be detected in future research.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".