Use it or lose it: A model-based assessment of the hypothesis that European Neanderthals relied on wildfires to create their campfires

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.