HUMANS, CLIMATE AND FIRE AT THE MOUSTERIAN SITE OF ROC DE MARSAL, FRANCE

New excavations in the Mousterian cave sites of Pech de l'Azé I and IV and Roc de Marsal (SW France) have revealed a series of exceedingly well-preserved fire features. While it has been thought for some time that late Neandertals had the ability to use fire, good evidence for this behavior from well-excavated and well-documented sites is actually quite rare. At Roc de Marsal, for example, the original excavations undertaken in the 1950s revealed evidence of the use of fire but these excavations were never adequately published and these observations remained lost in the field notes. New excavations, now in their third year, revealed a set of extremely well preserved and delineated fire features at the base of the sequence, and modern methods of recovery coupled with micromorphological analyses and techniques such as casting and three dimensional scanning, have been critical to discovering and documenting these features. Current evidence from phytoliths and fauna show that these fires were made and used during temperate conditions, and other evidence shows that the use of fires diminishes later in the sequence as the climate turned colder.