1 EPHE, CNRS UMR5805, EPOC, Université Bordeaux 1, Talence, France, 2CNRS UMR5199 PACEA, Université Bordeaux 1, Talence, France, 3 Institute for Human Evolution, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa
Abstract
Background
It has been proposed that a greater control and more extensive use of fire was one of the behavioral innovations that emerged in Africa among early Modern Humans, favouring their spread throughout the world and determining their eventual evolutionary success. We would expect, if extensive fire use for ecosystem management were a component of the modern human technical and cognitive package, as suggested for Australia, to find major disturbances in the natural biomass burning variability associated with the colonisation of Europe by Modern Humans.
Methodology/Principal Findings
Analyses of microcharcoal preserved in two deep-sea cores located off Iberia and France were used to reconstruct changes in biomass burning between 70 and 10 kyr cal BP. Results indicate that fire regime follows the Dansgaard-Oeschger climatic variability and its impacts on fuel load. No major disturbance in natural fire regime variability is observed at the time of the arrival of Modern Humans in Europe or during the remainder of the Upper Palaeolithic (40–10 kyr cal BP).
Conclusions/Significance
Results indicate that either Neanderthals and Modern humans did not influence fire regime or that, if they did, their respective influence was comparable at a regional scale, and not as pronounced as that observed in the biomass burning history of Southeast Asia.
Citation: Daniau A-L, d'Errico F, Sánchez Goñi MF (2010) Testing the Hypothesis of Fire Use for Ecosystem Management by Neanderthal and Upper Palaeolithic Modern Human Populations. PLoS ONE 5(2): e9157. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0009157
Editor: James Holland Jones, Stanford University, United States of America
Received: January 27, 2009; Accepted: January 18, 2010; Published: February 11, 2010
Copyright: © 2010 Daniau et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Funding: The work of A.-L. Daniau was funded by a BDI-CNRS-Région Aquitaine fellowship. This study was supported by the RESOLuTION (ESF-Eurocores-Euroclimate), the OMLL (ESF-Eurocores) and ARTEMIS programmes, Région Aquitaine project 20040206003N and the Université Bordeaux1 BQR/RAMSEMAR (Reconnaissance Automatique des Micro-objets contenus dans les SEdiments MARins)/project 2003. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
* E-mail: al.daniau@bristol.ac.uk
Received: January 27, 2009; Accepted: January 18, 2010; Published: February 11, 2010
Copyright: © 2010 Daniau et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Funding: The work of A.-L. Daniau was funded by a BDI-CNRS-Région Aquitaine fellowship. This study was supported by the RESOLuTION (ESF-Eurocores-Euroclimate), the OMLL (ESF-Eurocores) and ARTEMIS programmes, Région Aquitaine project 20040206003N and the Université Bordeaux1 BQR/RAMSEMAR (Reconnaissance Automatique des Micro-objets contenus dans les SEdiments MARins)/project 2003. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
* E-mail: al.daniau@bristol.ac.uk
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HT/TC: John Hawks
