Ancient Humans Were Making Fire 350,000 Years Earlier Than Scientists Realized

Ancient humans produced fire 350,000 years earlier than scientists thought

By Meghan Bartels edited by Andrea Thompson

Set aside your matches or lighter and try to start a fire. Chances are you’ll be cold and hungry. But as early as 400,000 years ago, ancient hominids may have possessed the skills to summon flames, according to groundbreaking new evidence of firemaking, 350,000 years older than the first scientific examples.

Investigators seeking to understand our ancestors have long been interested in the fire technology they possessed. Researchers say that as ancient hominids developed the ability to control fire, they would have changed physically – developing smaller stomachs and more powerful brains thanks to cooking which gave them the ability to metabolize food more easily – as well as socially, with individuals able to build more complex relationships around a hearth.

But traces of fire use are difficult to find, making archaeologists’ attempts to date these developments futile. “Things like ash and charcoal are very light, so they move very easily,” says Sarah Hlubik, a paleoarchaeologist at St. Mary’s College in Maryland, who was not involved in the new research. “A lot of evidence is disappearing.”

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Additionally, it is difficult to distinguish whether ancient hominids made fire themselves or captured fire from natural lightning and dealt with it. Overall, scientists believe that some human ancestors in Africa may have been using fire as early as 1.5 million years ago, but have hotly debated whether hominids could have been manufacturing their own fire so far in the past. To date, the earliest evidence of fire-making hominids is much more recent, dating only 50,000 years ago.

“Before I saw this, I would have said no, people didn’t make fires in those days,” says Amy Clark, an archaeologist at Harvard University who was also not involved in the new research.

The new evidence comes from an English site called Barnham, which scientists have been excavating for decades. Researchers noticed an area of ​​unusually red earth, a characteristic that occurs when earth is repeatedly heated. Tests confirmed that the material grew in place and did so after being repeatedly heated to temperatures of 400 to 750 degrees Celsius (752 to 1,382 degrees Fahrenheit), independent of any regional fire activity.

Continued excavations found four stone axes that had been broken by fire. Most compelling is that the researchers discovered two tiny fragments of iron pyrite. This mineral, not found naturally within a 10 mile radius of the Barnham site, can create sparks when struck by flint.

It’s not a perfect discovery: In an ideal world, researchers would also have found the scars left on the flint and pyrite by the fire-starting process. But it’s unprecedented evidence of early fires.

“For me, the modern equivalent would be if the police found a burnt-out car in a remote forest with an empty petrol can, and concluded that one was linked to the other,” says Nick Ashton, co-author of the study and an archaeologist at the British Museum.

Even researchers who are not affiliated with the work agree that the team made a compelling discovery. “The evidence for fire is really, really strong,” says Gilliane Monnier, an archaeologist at the University of Minnesota. “This is a very rare find.”

No hominid remains have been found at the site, leaving some uncertainty as to who precisely summoned the flames. Scientists have found a skull with Neanderthal features further south in England, but the inhabitants of the Barnham site may have instead been Homo heidelbergensisa second early hominid species. Regardless, these ancient humans were skilled foragers and hunter-gatherers who lived in small groups of about a dozen people and rarely crossed paths with other bands.

The isolated lifestyle of these hominids may also make it dangerous for scientists to extrapolate evidence from a single site to the population as a whole, says Dennis Sandgathe, an archaeologist at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, who was not involved in the new research. He says he is confident that Barnham’s findings do indeed represent the first fires, but says such technology would have been discovered and – probably more often – forgotten repeatedly in many places over the hundreds of millennia involved in scientists’ reconstruction of the timing of fires.

After all, he says, archaeologists have explored dozens of sites from this part of the Paleolithic, representing hundreds of ancient human groups over time. At no site other than Barnham has anyone ever found iron pyrite, the “smoking gun” in the new research. If this technology were widespread, he said, someone would have noticed it before now.

“We would all like to find a piece of pyrite,” says Sandgathe. “We’ll pounce on him if he shows up.”

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