KEEPING WARM 
Hearth and Home in the Old Stone Age 
Lighting a fire was only one of the ways 
prehistoric humans kept warm 
by Catherine Perles 
Early human populations did not, in 
most regions and periods, have to with- 
stand a very cold climate, but numerous 
prehistoric hunter-gatherers did adapt 
to cold steppe and tundra environments, 
surviving the periodic onslaughts of the 
Ice Age glaciers. Archeological knowl- 
edge of the means of such adaptation is, 
however, still largely hypothetical. The 
remains of fur clothes, skin dwellings, 
and similar organic materials are rarely 
preserved, so the existence of such items 
usually can only be inferred from indi- 
rect evidence. And while fire leaves 
traces of calcination — powder and ash 
formed by the action of the heat — 
interpretation of these traces is still diffi- 
cult. Burned bones or stones, ashes, and 
charcoal all attest to the use of fire but 
seldom tell us its purpose: hearths lit for 
heating or lighting a habitation or for 
grilling meat leave very similar traces. 
Although the earliest stone and bone 
tools were made by humans living in 
Africa some 3 million years ago, the 
oldest evidence discovered of the use of 
fire comes from Europe (l’Escale and 
Terra Amata in France, Vertesszolds in 
Hungary) and Asia (Chou-k’ou-tien in 
China). The European sites are attrib- 
uted to the second glacial period 
(500,000-400,000 years ago) while 
Chou-k’ou-tien dates from the warm 
interglacial period that followed. Sev- 
eral other Eurasian examples date from 
the third glacial period (200,000- 
100,000 years ago), whereas in Africa, 
evidence of fire seems to be of a much 
later date. 
That the use of fire should appear 
first in northern regions and during rela- 
tively cold periods has often been taken 
as proof that fire was a prerequisite to 
the colonization of what was an inhospi- 
table environment. According to this 
argument, early hominids ( Australo- 
pithecus and Homo habilis) were con- 
fined to the ancestral African home 
because they lacked fire, while at a later 
stage, more evolved hominids ( Homo 
erectus) were able to expand all over the 
world with the aid of fire. While it is 
true that all the oldest traces of fire can 
be attributed to Homo erectus , this does 
not necessarily establish a link between 
fire and the colonization of Eurasia. 
Fire, with its many applications, is just 
as useful in Africa as anywhere else, and 
it would be premature to conclude that 
it is not as ancient on that continent. 
Furthermore, the European climate dur- 
ing the second glaciation was not very 
cold, and the Vertesszolds hearths actu- 
ally date from a warm interphase that 
occurred during the second glacial 
period. Most important, perhaps, is that 
an even larger number of Eurasian sites 
of the same antiquity, and sometimes 
older, show no trace of fire use, demon- 
strating that prehistoric humans could 
adapt to these colder environments with- 
out an artificial source of warmth. 
In fact, the use of fire seems to have 
spread rather slowly in Europe and 
Asia. All throughout the Lower Paleo- 
lithic (from 3 million to 100,000 years 
ago), hearths and other remains of com- 
bustion are scarce; not until the Middle 
Paleolithic (from 100,000 to 35,000 
years ago), does the use of fire become 
the rule rather than the exception. This 
change has often been interpreted as a 
major technological shift from the (un- 
reliable) preservation of embers from 
natural sources to the systematic pro- 
duction of fire. Unfortunately, it is un- 
likely that we will ever be able to prove 
this hypothesis because the simplest 
fire-producing devices leave no specific 
traces in prehistoric sites. 
Many technologically simple means 
to create fire have been feasible for 
several hundred thousand years. These 
primitive methods can be grouped into 
two categories: percussion between two 
stones and friction between two pieces 
of wood. Rapid friction between two 
sticks of wood will generate sufficient 
heat to kindle such flammable material 
as dry moss, tow (plant fibers), or saw- 
dust. Friction can be produced manually 
by a sawing motion or by placing one 
stick of wood on another and twirling, or 
rotating, it between the palms of the 
hands. One method of speeding up rota- 
tion, and thus enhancing the efficiency 
of the fire drill, is to loop a leather strap 
or bowstring around the stick and draw 
it back and forth. Lighting a fire by 
striking two stones together is generally 
more difficult. If two pieces of flint are 
used, the tiny sparks produced must 
come immediately in contact with very 
flammable tow. It is easier to produce 
fire by striking flint against a “fire- 
stone” of iron mineral such as pyrite or 
chalcopyrite, both abundant in nature. 
All such apparatuses for making fire 
are light and easy to carry, and their 
elements are easy to replace; equipped 
with them, prehistoric people could 
hav& produced fire wherever they were. 
But archeologists have little indication 
of when these possibilities were first 
exploited. Except in unusual circum- 
stances, wood disappears when buried in 
the ground, so there is little hope of 
finding wooden fire drills or sticks. A 
few remains, such as a carbonized stick 
found at Krapina, in Yugoslavia, are not 
convincing evidence. Flints for starting 
fires must have been preserved, but we 
have not been able to distinguish them 
from other tools made of knapped, or 
chipped, stone. As for the pyrite fire- 
stones, the most ancient one recovered 
dates only from the Upper Paleolithic 
(35,000 to 12,000 years ago); these tools 
seem to be more abundant in later sites, 
such as the Mesolithic settlement of 
Star Carr in England (9,500 years ago). 
We may never know when human 
beings learned how to produce fire, but 
this technological achievement may 
have had fewer implications than the 
discovery of the use of fire itself. From 
the very beginning, the acquisition of 
fire must have meant a new distribution 
of tasks within the prehistoric group. 
Some members may have specialized in 
maintaining the fire — important for 
symbolic as well as practical reasons — 
while others collected the necessary 
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