Humans mastered the art of creating fire 400,000 years ago, almost 350,000 years earlier than previously known, according to a groundbreaking discovery made in a field in Suffolk.
Humans are known to have used natural fire more than 1 million years ago, but so far the earliest clear example of humans lighting fires was discovered at a site in northern France dating back to 50,000 years ago.
The latest evidence, including a patch of scorched earth and fire-cracked hand axes, strongly suggests that humans were creating fire much earlier, at a time when brain size was approaching modern human size and some species were spreading into harsher northern climates, including Britain.
“The implications are huge,” said Dr Rob Davies, a Paleolithic archaeologist at the British Museum who 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 started the fire at the scene in the village of Barnham, Suffolk, are unlikely to have been our ancestors, since homo sapiens had no sustained presence outside of Africa until approximately 100,000 years ago. Instead, the inhabitants were likely early Neanderthals, judging by roughly the same age fossils from Swanscombe, Kent and Atapuerca, Spain, which preserve early Neanderthal DNA.
“So early Neanderthals were making fire in Britain around 400,000 years ago,” said Professor Chris Stringer from the Natural History Museum and part of the team behind the discoveries. “Of course, our species evolved in Africa, while these people lived in Britain and Europe. We assume that our species also had this knowledge, but we actually have no evidence for this.”
The much earlier timing of fire 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. Fire control provided warmth, light, protection from predators and allowed people to process a wider range of food productssupporting better survival, larger groups and freeing up energy for brain development.
“All of these things came together to allow humans to be more adaptable, to be able to spread into harsher, colder environments and to be able to more successfully occupy northern latitudes – places like Britain,” Davis said.
“Fire becomes the center of social interaction, food sharing, language development, early storytelling and myth-making,” he added.
The investigation focused on a disused clay pit where stone tools were first discovered in the early 1900s and where scientists returned as recently as 2013 as part of the Pathways to Ancient Britain project.
“It took many, many years to get to where we are today,” said Professor Nick Ashton, curator of Paleolithic collections at the British Museum, who co-led the study. “The first hints of a fire appeared around 2014.”
However, it was unclear whether this was an opportunistic use of wildfire or an artificial fire. The turning point was the discovery of two fragments of iron pyrite, a natural mineral that creates sparks when struck by flint.
The extreme rarity of pyrite in the area (it was not in the database containing 33,000 specimens from Barnham) strongly suggests that it was mined from chalk coastal outcrops tens of kilometers away and brought to the area for use as a fire-fighting agent. “It is incredible that some of the earliest Neanderthal groups knew about the properties of flint, pyrite and tinder so early,” Ashton said.
Geochemical studies also showed that the area of reddened clay was heated to temperatures of more than 700°C (1,292°F) by repeated use of fire in the same location. Taken together, this strongly suggests that a fire or hearth that people used several times, according to the article published in the journal Nature.
Ségolène Vandevelde, an archaeologist at the University of Quebec at Chicoutimi who was not involved in the study, said the results were convincing.
“The discovery of pyrite associated with these fire marks is the icing on the cake, as this is the earliest known case of humans starting a fire,” she said.
“If the ability to start a fire is so ancient, we can speculate that the mastery of fire and its habitual use may have even more ancient origins. These results encourage a more careful search for traces of fire in ancient objects, even where they may be difficult to detect due to alteration processes.”
