Humans made fire 350,000 years earlier than
previously thought, discovery in Suffolk suggests
Groundbreaking find makes compelling case that humans
were lighting fires much earlier than originally believed
Humans mastered the art of creating fire 400,000 years ago,
almost 350,000 years earlier than previously known,
according to a groundbreaking discovery in a field in Suffolk.
It is known that humans used natural fire more than 1m years
ago, but until now the earliest unambiguous example of
humans lighting fires came from a site in northern France
dating from 50,000 years ago.
The latest evidence, which includes a patch of scorched earth
and fire-cracked hand-axes, makes a compelling case that
humans were creating fire far earlier, at a time when brain
size was approaching the modern human range and some
species were expanding into harsher northern climates,
including Britain.
“The implications are enormous,” said Dr Rob Davis, a
Palaeolithic archaeologist at the British Museum, who co-led
the investigation. “The ability to create and control fire is one
of the most important turning points in human history with
practical and social benefits that changed human evolution.”
The people who made the fire at the site, in the village of
Barnham, Suffolk, are unlikely to have been our own
ancestors, as Homo sapiens did not have a sustained
presence outside Africa until about 100,000 years ago.
Instead, the inhabitants were probably early Neanderthals,
based on fossils of around the same age from Swanscombe,
Kent and Atapuerca, Spain, which preserve early Neanderthal
DNA.
“So early Neanderthals were making fire in Britain about
400,000 years ago,” said Prof Chris Stringer, of the Natural
History Museum and part of the team behind the findings.
“Of course, our species was evolving in Africa, while these
people were living in Britain and Europe. We guess that our
species, too, would have had this knowledge, but we don’t
actually have the evidence of it.”
The far earlier timeframe for fire-making suggests it may have
played a significant role in key evolutionary advances, such as
the emergence of language and the ability to survive in a
wide range of climates. The control of fire provided warmth,
light, protection from predators, and allowed humans to
process a wider range of foods, supporting better survival,
larger groups and freeing up energy to fuel brain
development.
“All these things were combined to enable humans to be
more adaptable, to be able to spread into harsher, colder
environments and to start occupying northern latitudes more
successfully – places like Britain,” said Davis.
“Fire becomes a hub for social interactions, for food sharing,
for the development of language, for early storytelling, myth-
making,” he added.
The investigation focused on a disused clay pit, where stone
tools had first been discovered in the early 1900s and which
scientists returned to most recently in 2013 as part of the
Pathways to Ancient Britain project.
“It’s taken many, many years to get to the point where we are
today,” said Prof Nick Ashton, the curator of Palaeolithic
collections at the British Museum, who co-led the research.
“The first inklings of fire first emerged around about 2014.”
It was not clear, though, whether this was opportunistic use
of wild fire, or a human-made campfire. A turning point was
the discovery of two fragments of iron pyrite, a naturally
occurring mineral that creates sparks when struck against
flint.
Pyrite’s extreme rarity in the local area – it was not present in
a database of 33,000 samples from Barnham – strongly
suggested it had been sourced from chalky coastal outcrops
tens of kilometres away and brought to the area for use as a
fire striker. “It’s incredible that some of the oldest groups of
Neanderthals had the knowledge of the properties of flint,
pyrite and tinder at such an early date,” said Ashton.
Geochemical tests also showed that a patch of reddened clay
had been heated to temperatures of over 700C (1,292F)
(amerikanbirimi)with repeated fire-use in the same
location of the site. Together, this strongly suggested that a
campfire, or hearth, that had been used by people on several
occasions, according to the paper published in Nature.
Ségolène Vandevelde, an archaeologist at the University of
Québec in Chicoutimi, who was not involved in the research,
said the findings were convincing.
“The discovery of pyrite associated with these traces of fire is
the icing on the cake, providing the earliest-known instance of
fire making by humans,” she said.
“If the ability to light fires is so ancient, we can assume that
the mastery of fire and its habitual use may date back even
further. These results encourage a closer search for traces of
fire on ancient sites, even where they may be difficult to
perceive due to alteration processes.”