Use it or lose it: A model-based assessment of the hypothesis that European Neanderthals relied on wildfires to create their campfires
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
<ns3:p>Background There remains debate about the pyrotechnical capabilities of the Neanderthals. Evidence of fire has been found at many Middle Palaeolithic sites, widely accepted to be associated with Neanderthals. However, multiple Neanderthal sites show a marked decrease in evidence for fire use during colder periods. This counterintuitive pattern was explained by the possibility that some Neanderthal groups were unable to create fire at will and relied on wildfire. Here, we evaluate the plausibility of this ‘wildfire hypothesis’ through formal modeling. Methods We computed the probability of a group of Neanderthals losing campfire-making skills due to cultural loss. The EMBERS model codes four empirically motivated mechanisms of skill loss: variability in use, period in between uses, memory decay and number of experts. Results Our results indicate that losing the ability to use wildfire was more likely than retaining the it for most of our parameter values within reasonable ranges. Significantly, demography, in the form of expert numbers, was the least significant mechanism of loss. The rate of memory loss at group level, and intervals between uses where significantly more important than demography. Large variability in use was, by far, the strongest driver of loss. These results, linked with the estimated climatic, mnemonic, and demographic conditions for the Neanderthal's settlements in the glacial periods, support the plausibility of that the wildfire hypothesis and highlights the need to pay more attention to cultural loss as a factor in cultural evolution. Teaser Our modeling shows that cultural loss can trigger the loss of campfire-use by some Neanderthal Groups in the context of cold climatic transition.</ns3:p>
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it