This paper analyzes the significant leap in fire-use technology during the Late Upper Paleolithic across the Old Continent and its regional disparities. The study focuses on the tripartite technological system of “Tripod-Arranged hearths + batch pottery + fire-managed landscape” discovered at the Zhaojia Xuyao site (Linzi District, Zibo City, Shandong Province, China), systematically comparing it with the long-stagnant primitive fire-use patterns in Southeast Asia. It reveals that although Southeast Asia possesses a fire-use history spanning nearly 100,000 years, its technological morphology remained locked in the chaotic stage of “primary fire pits”. In absolute contrast, Zhaojia Xuyao in Shandong suddenly emerged with structurally precise and functionally composite “Tripod-Arranged hearths” and an accompanying pottery system during the Late Glacial extreme cold event around 13,000 years ago. This paper argues that this chasm is not a gradual differentiation determined by environment, but a “technological mutation” triggered under extreme survival pressure. The “comfort zone” of Southeast Asia led its technological evolution into a “mechanistic lock-in”; whereas the “glacial crucible” of the North, superimposed with tens of thousands of years of continuous technological accumulation and the active will to construct fire in the Haidai region, constituted the absolute conditions for this mutation. Earlier pottery in the South degenerated into “isolated variations” due to the lack of a continuous foundation, while complex hearths in Europe halted at “physical thermal insulation” due to the lack of thermodynamic integration. Although technological elements diffused southward, Southeast Asia could only produce “downgrade substitutes,” utterly unable to inherit the core law of “disciplining fire”. Using fire does not equal civilization; establishing rules for fire does.
Jing Zhang (Thu,) studied this question.