Emily Chan
This technique helped the researchers work out the order in which the hearths were created through their positioning in the sediment layers.
It interprets the signatures of the Earth’s past magnetic field from burned archaeological remains. The burnt materials contain evidence of the intensity and the direction of the magnetic field at the time the last fire was made.
The analyses showed that the Neanderthal hearths were formed decades or even a century apart, allowing the researchers to place the activities on a more accurate timeline.
“When we excavate archaeological settlement areas, we assume that they are the result of many events of human activity, but until now, we did not know exactly how much time had passed between these activities,” Santiago Sossa-Ríos, a co-author of the study and a researcher at the University of Valencia in Spain, said.
“We did not know whether it was decades, centuries, or thousands of years.”
Neanderthals went extinct around 40,000 years ago. The sites where they created fires can provide important information about their lives.
The new findings also suggest that Neanderthals were often on the move, but in some cases, they may have gone back to previous settlements after many years but still within the span of individual lifetimes.
In the future, the technique applied in this study may even be of great help in other archaeological contexts.
You can see the study here.
