Set aside your matches or lighter and try to start a fire; chances are you’ll be left cold. But as early as 400,000 years ago ancient hominins might have had the skills to conjure flame, according to groundbreaking new evidence of fire making that is 350,000 years older than scientists’ previous earliest example.
Investigators looking to understand our ancestors have long been interested in the technology they possessed surrounding fire. Researchers have argued that as ancient hominins developed the ability to control fire, they would have changed physically—developing a smaller stomach and a more powerful brain thanks to cooked food, which is easier to metabolize than raw—as well as socially, with individuals being able to build more complex relationships around a hearth.
But traces of fire use are difficult to come by, leaving archaeologists frustrated in their attempts to date these developments. “Things like ash and charcoal, they’re very light, so they move very easily,” says Sarah Hlubik, a paleoarchaeologist at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. “A lot of the evidence kind of disappears.” Hlubik was not involved in the new research, which was published in Nature.
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In addition, it’s challenging to distinguish whether ancient hominins were making fire themselves or capturing flames from natural lightning strikes and tending to them. Overall, scientists believe some human ancestors in Africa might have been using fire as early as 1.5 million years ago, but they have fiercely debated whether hominins could have been making their own fire so far in the past. Before this new discovery, the earliest evidence of hominins making fire was much more recent—from only 50,000 years ago.
“Before seeing this, I would have said, no, people didn’t make fire at this time period,” says Amy Clark, an archaeologist at Harvard University, who was also not involved in the newly published research.
The new evidence comes from an English site called Barnham, which scientists have been excavating for decades. Researchers noticed a patch of soil that appeared unusually red, a characteristic known to occur when dirt is repeatedly heated. Tests confirmed that the reddened material developed in place through repeated heating to temperatures roughly in the range of 752 to 1,382 degrees Fahrenheit (400 to 750 degrees Celsius), independent of any regional fire activity.
Shown here is one of two nodules of iron pyrite found at Barnham, a 400,000-year-old archaeological site in England. The nodules are part of new evidence that hominins produced fire earlier than expected.
Jordan Mansfield/Pathways to Ancient Britain Project
Continued excavations turned up four stone hand axes that had been shattered by fire. Most convincing of all, the researchers uncovered two tiny fragments of iron pyrite. This mineral—not naturally found within nearly 10 miles of the Barnham site—can create sparks when it’s struck by flint.
This finding is not perfect: in an ideal world, the researchers also would have found the scars left behind on flint and pyrite from the fire-sparking process. But it’s unprecedented evidence of early fire making.
“To me, the modern-day equivalent would be if the police found a burned-out car in a remote bit of woodland with an empty petrol can, and they drew the conclusion that one circumstance was related to the other,” says study co-author Nick Ashton, an archaeologist at the British Museum.
Even researchers who are not affiliated with the work agree that the team has made a compelling discovery. “The evidence for fire is really quite solid,” says Gilliane Monnier, an archaeologist at the University of Minnesota. “It’s a very rare find.”
No hominin remains have been found at the site, leading to some uncertainty about who precisely would have been conjuring flames. Scientists speculate that both Neandertals and Homo heidelbergensis, a different early hominin species, are likely candidates. Either way, researchers say, these ancient humans were skilled foragers and hunter-gatherers who lived in small groups of perhaps a dozen people and only rarely crossed paths with other bands.
The hominins’ isolated lifestyle may also make it risky for scientists to extrapolate evidence from a single site to the population at large, says Dennis Sandgathe, an archaeologist at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, who was not involved in the new research. He says he’s convinced that the Barnham finds do represent early fire making but argues that such technology would have been discovered and forgotten—probably more often the latter—many times in many places over hundreds of millennia.
After all, Sandgathe says, archaeologists have explored dozens of sites from this part of the Paleolithic, representing hundreds of ancient human groups over time. At no site besides Barnham has anyone ever found iron pyrite, the “smoking gun” of the new research. If this technology were widespread, he says, someone would have noticed before now.
“We’d all love to find a piece of pyrite,” Sandgathe says. “We’d pounce on it if it showed up.”