Scientists have discovered the oldest known evidence of fire-making by prehistoric humans in the English county of Suffolk – a hearth apparently made by Neanderthals around 415,000 years ago – revealing that this milestone for our evolutionary lineage took place much earlier than previously known.
At an old clay pit for making bricks near the village of Barnham, the researchers found a patch of heated clay, some hot-crushed flint handaxes and two pieces of iron pyrite – a mineral that creates sparks when struck against flint to ignite tines – which they identified as a repeatedly used campfire.
It was situated near a waterhole where these people camped.
“We think people brought pyrite to the site with the intention of making fire. And this has huge implications, pushing back the earliest fire-making,” said archaeologist Nick Ashton, curator of the Palaeolithic Collections at the British Museum in London and leader of the research published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
Until now, the earliest known evidence of fire-making dates from about 50,000 years ago at a site in northern France, also attributed to Neanderthals.
The controlled use of fire was a defining event for the human evolutionary lineage, not only for cooking and protection from predators, but to provide warmth that allowed hunter-gatherers to thrive in areas with colder environments.
“Places like Britain, for example,” said British Museum archaeologist and co-author Rob Davis.
Through cooking, our forerunners were able to remove pathogens from meat and toxins from edible roots and tubers. Cooking made these foods more tender and digestible, releasing bodily energy from the gut to promote the development of the brain.
Being able to consume a greater variety of foods supported better survival and allowed for feeding larger groups of people, according to the researchers.
Fire may also have contributed to social development. The use of fire at night allowed these people to gather and socialize, perhaps engage in storytelling and develop language and belief systems.
“The campfire becomes a social hub,” Davis said.
“We’re a species that used fire to really shape the world around us,” Davis said, noting that the new findings show that this trait is something our species Homo sapiens shares in common with Neanderthals and possibly other large-brained human relatives who lived at the time like the Denisovans.
The Paleolithic or Old Stone Age site at Barnham predates the earliest known Homo sapiens fossils in Africa.
The researchers believe that Neanderthals, our close evolutionary cousins, were the creators of fire, further evidence showing the intelligence and ingenuity of these archaic people long vilified in popular culture.
Paleoanthropologist and study co-author Chris Stringer said no human fossil remains were found at the Barnham site.
But Stringer noted that pieces of a roughly 400,000-year-old human skull characteristic of a Neanderthal were found in the mid-20th century less than 100 miles (160 km) to the south in a town called Swanscombe. Stringer said the Swanscombe skull fragments match Neanderthal fossils from a site called Sima de los Huesos, meaning “Hole of the Bones,” near Burgos, Spain, dating to about 430,000 years ago.
“So it was very likely that the Barnham firemakers were early Neanderthals, like the Swanscombe and Sima people,” Stringer said.
Neanderthals became extinct around 39,000 years ago, not long after Homo sapiens swept through the European territory they called home. Their legacy lives on in the genomes of most people on Earth, thanks to interbreeding between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals before their disappearance.
Previous archaeological work at the site has given researchers a good understanding of what the site was like at the time the hearth was made, with a rich variety of animals from elephants to smaller mammals and birds, and evidence of human activity in the form of cut marks on animal bones.
There is archaeological evidence from Africa, dating back more than a million years, of people using naturally occurring fire—from wildfires or lightning strikes—but these sites lacked evidence of deliberate fire-making.
The researchers spent four years carrying out tests to show that the evidence from Barnham was deliberately set on fire. They said several pieces of evidence demonstrated this, including geochemical tests that revealed there had been temperatures of more than 700 degrees Celsius (1290 degrees Fahrenheit) with repeated fire use at the same site.
