Late Mid-Pleistocene hominin fire control inferred from sooty speleothem analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The origin of fire control is considered a major turning point in human evolution and remains a highly debated albeit central subject in archaeology. Studying paleo-fires is challenging because of taphonomic phenomena that alter combustion structures and hinder the identification of the oldest hearths. Moreover, hearths do not record all fire events and do not provide a chronological record of fire. In contrast, speleothems, carbonated cave deposits, can preserve evidence of ancient fires, including soot traces, and these features can be dated directly using radiometric methods. Orgnac 3, an important archaeological sequence in western Europe, provides a case study on the origins of habitual fire use in this region during the transition between the Lower and Middle Paleolithic. This paper presents the first documented record of over 20 fire events at this ancient site. The habitual use of fire by Mid-Pleistocene hominins at the site is well documented within sooty speleothems, as opposed to relying on scattered and rare traces. The soot deposit sequence at Orgnac 3 is the strongest and best-documented evidence of repeated fire use at the site to date. The robust fire-use chronology is established using stratigraphic U-Th dating of the speleothem. The soot record at Orgnac 3, testifying to fire events during both dry and wet periods, supports the hypothesis that around 270,000 years ago in the Rhone Valley, Mid-Pleistocene hominins could control fire or at least maintain fire throughout the year.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".