“It is certainly possible that Homo sapiens in Africa had the ability to make fire, but this cannot yet be proven by evidence. At the moment we only have evidence from Barnham,” Natural History Museum London anthropologist Chris Stringer, co-author of the study, said at a press conference.
The two side fragments of pyrite may have broken off from the larger nodule when it was struck by a piece of flint.
Photo: Jordan Mansfield, Pathways to Ancient Britain Project.
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Several types of evidence at the site indicate that Neanderthals started the fire themselves rather than borrowing fire from a local forest fire. Ancient wildfires leave traces in sediments that can last hundreds of thousands of years or more—microscopic pieces of charcoal and ash. But the area that is now Suffolk was not at the height of the bushfire season when the Barnham hotspot was used. Chemical evidence, such as the presence of heavy hydrocarbon molecules in the sediment around the fire, suggests that this fire was self-made (wildfires typically scatter lighter molecules over an area of ​​several square kilometers).
But the key evidence in Barnham—the kind of evidence arson investigators probably covet—is pyrite. Pyrite is not a naturally occurring mineral in the Barnham area; Neanderthals would have had to travel at least 12 kilometers to the southeast to find anything. And while few hominids could resist the temptation to pick up a shiny rock, it is likely that these pieces of pyrite had a more practical purpose.
To find out what type of fire might have caused the reddened clay, Davis and his colleagues conducted several experiments (which involved setting fire to clay taken from the area). Archaeologists compared baked clay from Barnham with clay from experimental fires. The grain size and chemical composition of the clay from the ancient Neanderthal hearth looked almost exactly the same as “12 or more heating periods, each lasting 4 hours at 400 or 600 degrees Celsius,” Davis and his colleagues wrote.
In other words, the Barnham hearth hints at the rhythms of daily life of one group of Neanderthals 400,000 years ago. Firstly, it appears that they lit a fire in the same place over and over again and left it burning for hours. The flint chips nearby conjure up images of Neanderthals sitting around a fire, banging stone tools and telling each other stories late into the night.
Nature, 2025 DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-09855-6 About DOI).
