Q5 - Archaeologist: The earliest evidence of controlled fire

[mshinners]

Question Type:
Necessary Assumption

Stimulus Breakdown:
Evidence of controlled fire in Europe starts ~400,000 years ago. Thus, anyone concluding humans living in Europe needed fireplaces is on shaky ground.

Answer Anticipation:
Big assumption? There were people in Europe before ~400,000 years ago.

However, there's another potential anticipation you might have had that, in other questions would be likely, but in this question wouldn't be. That anticipation would be about the evidence being complete. The premise here is that the earliest evidence is from 400,000 years ago. What if there's other evidence that hasn't been found yet? Doesn't this argument need to assume that we have a complete set of evidence?

Nope! If the conclusion were more absolute - the common belief is wrong - then it'd be an assumption of the argument. However, the conclusion is just that the lack of evidence casts doubt on the conclusion. And missing evidence does cast doubt on a conclusion, even if it's later found to exist (at which point, that doubt would be removed).

Correct answer:
(E)

Answer choice analysis:
(A) Out of scope. The reason that fire is considered necessary is out of the scope of the argument, which only cares about whether it was necessary.

(B) Opposite. If anything, this helps out the prevailing view that fire was necessary for survival, not the archaeologists argument that the view is wrong.

(C) Out of scope. You may have thought that the ability to take advantage of naturally occurring fires serves as an alternative to controlled fires, and it does. However, this answer doesn't establish it as a replacement for controlled fires ("occasionally"), and so it's out of scope of an argument about controlled fires.

(D) Out of scope. For a Necessary Assumption question, what would have happened is rarely relevant. This answer choice is also about the reasons for controlling fire, not how it was used in Europe.

(E) Bingo. If we negate this - there were no humans in Europe prior to 400,000 years ago - the argument falls apart as the lack of evidence of controlled fires before that doesn't say anything about humans in Europe needing fire (since they didn't exist).

Takeaway/Pattern:
A lack of evidence doesn't prove something doesn't exist, but it is generally enough to say that we're uncertain of something's existence.

#officialexplanation