It’s easy to take for granted that modern humans can produce flames with just a flick of a lighter or a turn of the stove knob—for cooking food, lighting candles, or heating their homes.
For much of our history, archaeologists believe that early humans could only use fire when it occurred naturally, such as when lightning struck a tree. They could gather burning materials, transport them, and keep them alight. But they couldn’t start a fire on their own.
At some point, somewhere, that changed. A primitive human discovered that by rubbing two sticks together or striking the right types of stones at the right angle and with the right force, it was also possible to create fire.
Archaeologists have long wondered when that discovery happened. A new study, published in the journal Nature, provides the oldest evidence to date, found at an archaeological site in eastern Great Britain.
“This is a 400,000-year-old site where we have the oldest evidence of [humans] producing fire—not just in Great Britain or Europe—but anywhere in the world,” said Nick Ashton, archaeologist at the British Museum and one of the study’s authors.
The discovery suggests that early humans were producing fire more than 350,000 years earlier than previously thought.
“For me, personally, it’s the most exciting discovery of my 40-year career,” Ashton said.
What makes the site so unique is that Ashton and his colleagues found the raw materials for starting fire—fragments of iron pyrite next to fire-struck flint axes, in what appears to be a hearth. A geological analysis revealed that pyrite is incredibly rare in the area, suggesting that early humans brought it to the site with the intention of using it to start fires.
“As far as we know, we don’t know any other use for pyrite besides producing sparks with flint to start fire,” said Dennis Sandgathe, archaeologist at Simon Fraser University, who was not involved in the new study. “And of all the dozens and dozens of sites in Eurasia and Africa that we’ve excavated and that contain fire residues, no one had discovered a piece of pyrite before.” The ability to make fire, archaeologists agree, is one of the most important discoveries in human history. It allowed early humans to protect themselves from predators, obtain more nutrients from the 
foods, and settle in inhospitable climates.
The possibility of gathering around a campfire at night would also have been a catalyst for social and behavioral evolution.
“Having fire provides intense socialization time after dark,” said Rob Davis, archaeologist at the British Museum and coauthor of the study. “And that’s really important for other developments, like the development of language, the development of narrative, early belief systems. And that may have played a fundamental role in maintaining social relationships over greater distances or within more complex social groups.”
Davis and his coauthors don’t know the identity of the people who used the site. But less than 160 kilometers to the south, archaeologists found fragments of a skull from the same period that could have belonged to a Neanderthal. “So, we presume that the fires at the site of the new study were made by early Neanderthals,” said Chris Stringer, anthropologist at the Natural History Museum in the UK and one of the study’s coauthors.
It’s possible that other early humans, including Homo sapiens, also had the ability to make fire, Stringer said. But it’s hard to say for sure.
Sandgathe, who has been investigating early human fire use for decades, said the discovery is very significant but cautioned that it shouldn’t be used to make broad generalizations about early human fire use.
Modern humans long assumed that the discovery of how to make fire was such an important technology that, once discovered, it would spread rapidly across the Old World like, well, wildfire—and from then on, everyone everywhere would be using it.
“Now we realize that was too simplistic,” he said. The most likely scenario, Sandgathe said, is that different groups of early humans accidentally discovered how to make fire at different times. The knowledge may have spread or it may have been lost.
“It’s not a linear story,” he said. “It’s a complex story, full of ups and downs, advances and setbacks, here and there—and many millennia when no one knew how to make fire, until it was rediscovered.”
Source: npr.org by Nathan Rott