ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2021
Middle Pleistocene fire use: The first signal of widespread cultural diffusion in human evolution.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 25 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
25 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- NAT2 global landscape: Genetic diversity and acetylation statuses from a systematic review.PloS one · 2023Pooled it
- The Evolutionary-Ecological Basis of Xenophilia.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2026Article
- Burn Selection: How Fire Injury Shaped Human Evolution.BioEssays : news and reviews in molecular, cellular and developmental biology · 2026Review
- Experimental analysis of roasted and raw turtle butchery and implications for early human cognition and behaviour.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Article
- Did Down-Regulated Instincts Enable Human Gene-Culture Coevolution?Evolutionary anthropology · 2025Review
- Flame-Retardant Ionogel Enabled by Lignin Molecular Networks for Fire Rescue.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2025Article
- Onset of extensive human fire use 50,000 y ago.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Use it or lose it: A model-based assessment of the hypothesis that European Neanderthals relied on wildfires to create their campfires.Open research Europe · 2025Article
- Late Acheulian stone-working by the riverbank: Patterns of continuity and change reflected in Jaljulia lithic assemblages, Israel.PloS one · 2025Article
- Early human collective practices and symbolism in the Early Upper Paleolithic of Southwest Asia.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Spread of the cycles: a feedback perspective on the Anthropocene.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Review
- Measuring ancient technological complexity and its cognitive implications using Petri nets.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Scaling Palaeolithic tar production processes exponentially increases behavioural complexity.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Human cooperation and evolutionary transitions in individuality.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- The house as a mind.F1000Research · 2023Article
- Production method of the Königsaue birch tar documents cumulative culture in Neanderthals.Archaeological and anthropological sciences · 2023Article
- Sound reasons for unsound sleep: Comparative support for the sentinel hypothesis in industrial and nonindustrial groups.Evolution, medicine, and public health · 2023Article
- Evidence for the cooking of fish 780,000 years ago at Gesher Benot Ya'aqov, Israel.Nature ecology & evolution · 2022Article
- Laboratory-based experimental research into the effect of diagenesis on heated bone: implications and improved tools for the characterisation of ancient fire.Scientific reports · 2022Article
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5 authors.
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Abstract
Control of fire is one of the most important technological innovations within the evolution of humankind. The archaeological signal of fire use becomes very visible from around 400,000 y ago onward. Interestingly, this occurs at a geologically similar time over major parts of the Old World, in Africa, as well as in western Eurasia, and in different subpopulations of the wider hominin metapopulation. We interpret this spatiotemporal pattern as the result of cultural diffusion, and as representing the earliest clear-cut case of widespread cultural change resulting from diffusion in human evolution. This fire-use pattern is followed slightly later by a similar spatiotemporal distribution of Levallois technology, at the beginning of the African Middle Stone Age and the western Eurasian Middle Paleolithic. These archaeological data, as well as studies of ancient genomes, lead us to hypothesize that at the latest by 400,000 y ago, hominin subpopulations encountered one another often enough and were sufficiently tolerant toward one another to transmit ideas and techniques over large regions within relatively short time periods. Furthermore, it is likely that the large-scale social networks necessary to transmit complicated skills were also in place. Most importantly, this suggests a form of cultural behavior significantly more similar to that of extant
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