About 400,000 years ago, in what is now eastern England, a group of Neanderthals used flint and pyrite to make fire near a water source — not just once, but several times, over many generations.
This is the conclusion of a study published last week in the journal Nature. Previously, the oldest evidence of humans making fire was around 50,000 years old. This new discovery shows that this important step in human history happened much earlier.
“A lot of people already suspected they were making fire at that time,” said Nick Ashton, an archaeologist at the British Museum and one of the study’s authors. “But now we can say with certainty, ‘Yes, that really happened.’”
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Since Charles Darwin, biologists have considered the mastery of fire a milestone in the evolution of our species. Early humans may have used fire to cook their food. This improved the diet, eliminating toxins and facilitating the absorption of nutrients. Fire also helped maintain heat at night and ward off predators.
Over time, fire gained new uses. They cooked tree bark to make glue, used to attach stone points to wooden spears. And starting about 10,000 years ago, humans began using fire to smelt copper and other metals, beginning civilization.
Despite the importance of fire to humanity, discovering its origin is a great challenge. The rain extinguishes ash and coal, eliminating evidence of the fire. And even when scientists find rare traces of ancient fires, it can be difficult to know whether they were caused by humans or lightning.
The oldest evidence of the use of fire by human ancestors, dated between 1 million and 1.5 million years ago, comes from a cave in South Africa. There, thousands of bone fragments from animals they hunted were found. Of these, 270 show signs of having been burned.
But these clues don’t clearly prove that those humans knew how to make fire. They may have just taken advantage of natural fires every now and then. Perhaps they learned to light a stick on a fire and take the embers back to the cave to cook.
But this method had its limitations, Ashton explained. “You depend on lightning,” he said. “It’s very unpredictable, you can’t count on it.”
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An important step was when the first humans discovered how to make fire whenever they wanted, whether by banging stones to create sparks or rubbing pieces of wood together until a flame appeared. “When you know how to make a fire, all those problems go away,” Ashton said.
Ashton and his team got their first hint of ancient fire pits in 2013 while excavating an archaeological site called Barnham in eastern England. For decades, researchers have found ancient tools and other signs of early humans there. In 2013, they found something new: pieces of flint broken in a strange way.
Only very strong heat could have shattered those hard stones. But they were unable to say whether the fire that broke Barnham’s flints was caused by humans or lightning.
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In the following years, researchers returned to Barnham trying to answer this question, without success. Until, one summer day in 2021, Ashton had an idea. As he prepared to take a nap under an oak tree, he remembered a red streak of clay he had seen years before. The nap was for later.
“I thought, I’ll take a quick look,” Ashton said.
He found the red stripe and soon realized it was about a two-foot layer of burnt old soil. Had humans made that fire, or was it lightning? Ashton and colleagues tested both hypotheses.
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Over the next four years, they analyzed the soil chemistry and excavated around it. Finally, they concluded that, around 400,000 years ago, the site was a water point that Neanderthals probably visited to hunt.
A natural fire would have left marks far away, but the researchers found none. Furthermore, the same area has been burned multiple times over decades. And the fires were very hot and lasted for hours. Researchers have become increasingly certain that generations of Neanderthals deliberately lit fires in Barnham.
One last important clue was the discovery of pieces of pyrite along with the heat-broken flints. Anthropologists have documented many groups of hunter-gatherers around the world who make fire by beating pyrite against flint.
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Even more impressive, Ashton said, is that the rocks around Barnham are free of pyrite. He assumes that the Neanderthals who made fire there brought pieces of the mineral from afar. The nearest source is about 65 km away.
The pyrite was “the icing on the cake,” said Ségolène Vandevelde, an archaeologist at the University of Quebec who was not involved in the study. “Altogether, it’s a really compelling case.”
But one question remains: how common was it to make fire 400,000 years ago?
Maybe not much, said Michael Chazan, an anthropologist at the University of Toronto who also wasn’t involved in the research. Other Neanderthals in Europe and the Middle East may have only collected embers from natural fires. Only in places like Barnham did they have the right chance to learn how to make fire.
“This experiment appears to be local,” said Chazan. “It makes sense to think that many Neanderthal groups didn’t have access to fire-lighting materials.”
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