Humans likely harvested their first flames from wildfire. When they learned to make it themselves, it changed everything.
While few of us today know how to start a bonfire without matches or a lighter, learning to make fire was one of the most critical developments in human history. New evidence suggests humans figured it out hundreds of thousands of years earlier than previously thought.
In a study published today in the journal Nature, a team of researchers claims to have discovered the earliest evidence of fire-making known to science at a Paleolithic site in Barnham, England, dated to over 400,000 years ago. It suggests that humans knew how to make fire approximately 350,000 years earlier than anthropologists believed.A fiery timeline
While prehistoric sites in Africa indicate that humans have been using fire for over a million years, pinpointing when humans learned how to make it is difficult. People likely started using fire by collecting it from natural wildfires before learning how to start it intentionally.
“Fire-making is a uniquely human innovation that stands apart from other complex behaviours such as tool production, symbolic culture and social communication. Controlled fire use provided adaptive opportunities that had profound effects on human evolution,” the researchers wrote in the paper. “Benefits included warmth, protection from predators, cooking and creation of illuminated spaces that became focal points for social interaction.”
Before this study, the earliest evidence of fire making came from handaxes found at Neanderthal sites in northern France, dating to 50,000 years ago.
