Use it or lose it: A model-based assessment of the hypothesis that European Neanderthals relied on wildfires to create their campfires
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Fire is a vital part of the hominin toolkit. There is debate, however, about Neanderthals’ pyrotechnical capabilities. They doubtlessly utilised fire, but multiple sites show a counterintuitive decrease in evidence for fire use during colder periods. This pattern has led some researchers to propose that some Neanderthals were unable to create fire from scratch and instead relied on wildfire. Here, we evaluate the plausibility of this hypothesis through formal modeling. Using numerical and analytical methods, we modeled the probability of a group of Neanderthals losing the skills necessary to exploit wildfire under different demographic and environmental conditions. Our results indicate that losing the ability to use wildfire was more likely than retaining the ability across most modeled scenarios due to cultural loss. This renders plausible that the reduction in fire evidence at many Neanderthal sites during colder periods is the result of Neanderthals having been reliant on wildfire.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| 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".