Deborah I. Olszewski

Using a count method of complete and proximal burned debitage ≥ 2.5 cm, Dibble and colleagues recorded a pattern of fire use by southwestern France Neandertals whereby fire use was more common in warmer rather than colder intervals of the late Pleistocene. A recent work by Abdolahzadeh and colleagues indicates that this pattern is also found in other areas of Europe. Here, we apply Dibble and colleagues’ burned lithics count method to assess fire use by Late Upper Paleolithic and Early Epipaleolithic modern humans living in the western highlands of Jordan. While the Levant is more southerly than Europe, colder conditions pertained during the Last Glacial Maximum. Our investigations aimed at examining if their count method is also applicable to modern human contexts and in areas that, while colder during the Last Glacial Maximum, would have been less cold overall than Europe. We conclude that their method of counting burned lithics is useful in these later contexts, and that, overall, modern humans living during the peak of the Late Glacial Maximum in the eastern Levant used fire somewhat more frequently than during warmer intervals. We also briefly touch on the longer-term perspective for fire use in the eastern Levant by discussing the Initial Upper Paleolithic and Middle Paleolithic site of ‘Ain Difla in the Wadi al-Hasa area. Such assessments have the potential to offer insights into modern human behaviors.

Stone artifacts (lithics) preserve for extended periods; thus they are key evidence for probing the evolution of human technological behaviors. Africa boasts the oldest record of stone artifacts, spanning 3.3 Ma, rare instances of ethnographic stone tool‐making, and stone tool archives from diverse ecological settings, making it an anchor for research on the long‐term temporal and spatial trends in human evolution. This paper reviews the application of scientific methods for studying African stone artifacts and highlights several popular research themes on the continent, including the origins of flaked stone technology, hunter‐gatherer mobility and landscape use, technological variability, function, biocultural evolution, and ancient human cognition. We conclude by outlining some key challenges to future lithic research in Africa.