"Finding Prometheus: The search for fire use in our early ancestors"

a talk by Sarah Hlubik

(College Fellow, Harvard Anthro)

ABSTRACT - The origins of human fire use is widely debated among paleolithic archaeologists and paleoanthropologists. Some place the origins firmly in the Middle Stone Age or Middle Paleolithic, when obvious archaeological evidence becomes widespread. However, some argue that fire use is much older - as early as 2 million years, based on a handful of archaeological sites and biological evidence from fossil skeletal material. The archaeology of fire in the Early Pleistocene (2.6-1.0 Ma) is poorly understood; most sites of this age are open-air and subject to a variety of post-depositional processes which can obscure or erase fire evidence in the record, and most localities are isolated in time and space. To understand the origins and extent of early human fire use, we must expand our methodological approach to include both sites and landscapes, and employ multiple proxies to investigate the frequency and intensity of fire evidence found.

BIO - Sarah Hlubik is an archaeologist and paleoanthropologist researching the origins of fire use in human prehistory and the effects that has had on our biology, environment, and sociality. Her work is focused on the Koobi Fora region of northern Kenya, on the eastern shore of Lake Turkana.

Location: Tozzer 203

45 minute talk

20 minute Q&A

Start: 3:00 p.m.

Please email amy_sylvester@fas.harvard.edu prior to September 22, 2022 to request the link to Zoom if you did not receive through mailing list. See link on top right of our Events page to subscribe to Harvard Archaeology Seminar Series.