The findings, described in the journal Nature, push back the earliest known date for controlled fire-making by roughly 350,000 years. Until now, the oldest confirmed evidence had come from Neanderthal sites in what is now northern France dating to about 50,000 years ago.
The discovery was made at Barnham, a Paleolithic site in Suffolk that has been excavated for decades. A team led by the British Museum identified a patch of baked clay, flint hand axes fractured by intense heat and two fragments of iron pyrite, a mineral that produces sparks when struck against flint.
Researchers spent four years analyzing to rule out natural wildfires. Geochemical tests showed temperatures had exceeded 700 degrees Celsius (1,292 Fahrenheit), with evidence of repeated burning in the same location.
Discovery of the first fragment of iron pyrite in 2017, at Barnham, Suffof, England. Credit: Jordan Mansfield/Pathways to Ancient Britain Project via AP
That pattern, they say, is consistent with a constructed hearth rather than a lightning strike.
Rob Davis, a Paleolithic archaeologist at the British Museum, said the combination of high temperatures, controlled burning and pyrite fragments shows “how they were actually making the fire and the fact they were making it.”
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Chris Stringer, a human evolution specialist at the Natural History Museum, said fossils from Britain and Spain suggest the inhabitants of Barnham were early Neanderthals whose cranial features and DNA point to growing cognitive and technological sophistication
For some reason I had always thought it was much longer ago than that even! I’ve learned something!
I mean, keep in mind that homo sapiens is 300k years old. This just adds more fuel to the theory that the reason we keep pushing the idea of “behavioral modernity” back in time with new discoveries is that the ancestral hominins qualified for at least the most basic interpretation and we just don’t have the evidence yet.
Oh, I didn’t think it was homo sapien sapiens that were doing fire in my imagined past, it was like.
Who existed like a million years ago? Lucy? Like that’s how long ago my brain though we had done fire things. For some reason.
One thing I learned from the book “Sapiens” is that there were actually five human species alive a mere 50K yrs ago, suggesting that it’s not unusual for there to be multiple types of humans alive going back to the very conceptual beginning of the great apes known as “humans,” 2+ million years ago.
Anyway, Homo erectus was the preeminent human alive ~1Mya, but there were evidently others, such as H. antecessor, H. habilis, and Paranthropus boisei.
Historians thinks our ancestors probably relied on fire further back than we have proof of widespread use, so your instincts are probably good! It will probably be pushed back further as we find new techniques to detect fire use. It’s apparently hard to find evidence and also to differentiate it from evidence of natural fires.
Though since we lack evidence I do like to imagine they truly didn’t regularly use fire during the last ice and had some elegant way to protect themselves from the cold without it.
Wow. Its strange to think how long we had these capacity but its only like 10% of that time before we started really making advances and even then like %1 for real technology and a fraction of a percent to get to plumbing and electicity being common.
