Human history is intimately entwined with the use and control of fire. However, working out when our relationship with fire began and how it subsequently evolved has been notoriously difficult.
Human history is intimately entwined with the use and control of fire. However, working out when our relationship with fire began and how it subsequently evolved has been notoriously difficult.
This is partly due to the incomplete nature of archaeological records, and also because fire use was fleeting, making burnt remains difficult to detect.
But our team has found evidence of the controlled use of fire by direct human ancestors—or hominins—at a site in Spain dating to 250,000 years ago. This pushes the earliest evidence of fire control in Europe back by 50,000 years. The findings have been published in Nature Scientific Reports. It is truly special to find the remains of human ancestors and fire at the same location.
There is much earlier evidence of hominins exploiting fire, but this could have taken the form of hominins taking advantage of the burning embers from a natural wildfire to cook their food. The controlled use of fire is where humans intentionally start it and then manage, say, its extent or temperature. This is what we have evidence for at the site in Spain.
Much older evidence from outside Europe, which could be from humans making use of natural blazes, comes from Swartkrans cave in South Africa, where hominin remains were found with hundreds of burnt animal bones dating to between 1 and 1.5 million years ago. Burnt animal bone fragments were also identified at the 1.5 million-year-old site known as FxJj 20AB at Koobi Fora, Kenya.
Yet finding hominin artefacts and burnt bones at the same site does not in itself indicate that they coincided in time, let alone that humans were controlling fire. The path to its controlled use, is likely to have been gradual.
Fast forward almost a million years to the earliest-known clear evidence of fire made by humans: an open-air site called Gesher Benot Ya’aqov in Israel, dated to about 790,000 years ago. The evidence found at this location includes charred plants and burnt stone tools lying alongside one another.
