Humans mastered the art of creating fire 400,000 years ago, almost 350,000 years earlier than previously known, according to a groundbreaking discovery in a field in Suffolk.
It is known that humans used natural fire more than 1m years ago, but until now the earliest unambiguous example of humans lighting fires came from a site in northern France dating from 50,000 years ago.
The latest evidence, which includes a patch of scorched earth and fire-cracked hand-axes, makes a compelling case that humans were creating fire far earlier, at a time when brain size was approaching the modern human range and some species were expanding into harsher northern climates, including Britain.
“The implications are enormous,” said Dr Rob Davis, a Palaeolithic archaeologist at the British Museum, who co-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 made the fire at the site, in the village of Barnham, Suffolk, are unlikely to have been our own ancestors, as Homo sapiens did not have a sustained presence outside Africa until about 100,000 years ago. Instead, the inhabitants were probably early Neanderthals, based on fossils of around the same age from Swanscombe, Kent and Atapuerca, Spain, which preserve early Neanderthal DNA.
“So early Neanderthals were making fire in Britain about 400,000 years ago,” said Prof Chris Stringer, of the Natural History Museum and part of the team behind the findings. “Of course, our species was evolving in Africa, while these people were living in Britain and Europe. We guess that our species, too, would have had this knowledge, but we don’t actually have the evidence of it.”
The far earlier timeframe for fire-making 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. The control of fire provided warmth, light, protection from predators, and allowed humans to process a wider range of foods, supporting better survival, larger groups and freeing up energy to fuel brain development.
“All these things were combined to enable humans to be more adaptable, to be able to spread into harsher, colder environments and to start occupying northern latitudes more successfully – places like Britain,” said Davis.
“Fire becomes a hub for social interactions, for food sharing, for the development of language, for early storytelling, myth-making,” he added.
The investigation focused on a disused clay pit, where stone tools had first been discovered in the early 1900s and which scientists returned to most recently in 2013 as part of the Pathways to Ancient Britain project.
“It’s taken many, many years to get to the point where we are today,” said Prof Nick Ashton, the curator of Palaeolithic collections at the British Museum, who co-led the research. “The first inklings of fire first emerged around about 2014.”
It was not clear, though, whether this was opportunistic use of wild fire, or a human-made campfire. A turning point was the discovery of two fragments of iron pyrite, a naturally occurring mineral that creates sparks when struck against flint.
Pyrite’s extreme rarity in the local area – it was not present in a database of 33,000 samples from Barnham – strongly suggested it had been sourced from chalky coastal outcrops tens of kilometres away and brought to the area for use as a fire striker. “It’s incredible that some of the oldest groups of Neanderthals had the knowledge of the properties of flint, pyrite and tinder at such an early date,” said Ashton.
Geochemical tests also showed that a patch of reddened clay had been heated to temperatures of over 700C (1,292F) with repeated fire-use in the same location of the site. Together, this strongly suggested that a campfire, or hearth, that had been used by people on several occasions, according to the paper published in Nature.
Ségolène Vandevelde, an archaeologist at the University of Québec in Chicoutimi, who was not involved in the research, said the findings were convincing.
“The discovery of pyrite associated with these traces of fire is the icing on the cake, providing the earliest-known instance of fire making by humans,” she said.
“If the ability to light fires is so ancient, we can assume that the mastery of fire and its habitual use may date back even further. These results encourage a closer search for traces of fire on ancient sites, even where they may be difficult to perceive due to alteration processes.”
