Nevertheless, researchers tend to assume they could do so. The archaeological record tells us these peoples were proficient users of fire, but the evidence that they could make fire themselves is lacking. 45,000–20,000 years ago) when warm-adapted modern humans ( Homo sapiens) replaced Neandertals in Ice Age Europe. My current Veni project will apply these same concepts to the early Upper Palaeolithic (ca. Making fire with reproduced prehistoric tools. These Neandertal bifaces are all around 50,000 years old, making them the oldest probable fire-making tools in the world! These tools support the idea that Neandertals were proficient users of fire, able to make it when and where they wanted to for cooking their food, warming themselves or even for producing birch bark tar for making tools. Using these methods, I have been able to identify mineral traces on dozens of Neandertal bifacial tools (or handaxes) from France that look very similar to the pyrite traces on my experimental tools. Using experimental fire-making tools, I am able to reproduce these pyrite traces and then compare them to mineral traces found on archaeological tools to determine if they are similar or different. This process leaves distinct mineral traces on the flint strike-a-lights that can be observed using a microscope. These sparks are directed onto easily flammable tinder materials which begin to smoulder once a spark has been ‘captured’. This work is primarily concerned with the stone-on-stone fire production system, so using pieces of flint as ‘strike-a-light’ tools to strike the mineral pyrite to produce sparks.

My research focuses on fire use by Palaeolithic peoples, including the identification of ancient fire-making tools using experimental archaeology in combination with microwear analysis. More recently, I was awarded a Veni Innovational Research Incentives Scheme Grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). Hi, there… my name is Andrew Sorensen, and I defended my PhD in Palaeolithic Archaeology and Material Culture Studies at the Leiden Faculty of Archaeology back in December 2018. Determining when and how fire entered our technological repertoire is key to understanding who we are as a species, and as a society. It is for this reason that the development of fire as an adaptive tool by humans is of such interest to us all. Without distant coal-fired power plants, internal combustion engines, furnaces and the like, life as we know it today could not exist. Yet fire remains the basis for the vast majority of our technology and comforts, despite being largely hidden away.

We set fire to the dark