Scientists have discovered the oldest known evidence of fire-setting by prehistoric humans in the English county of Suffolk – a hearth apparently made by Neanderthals around 415,000 years ago – revealing that this important step for our evolutionary lineage occurred much earlier than previously thought.
In an ancient clay pit for making bricks near the village of Barnham, researchers found a lump of heated clay, flint axes broken by the heat and two pieces of iron pyrite – a mineral that creates sparks when struck against flint to ignite the tinder – which they identified as a campfire used repeatedly.
It was located near a waterhole where these humans camped.
“We think humans brought pyrite to the site with the intention of making fire. And that has huge implications in fending off early fires,” said archaeologist Nick Ashton, curator of Paleolithic 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 fires dated around 50,000 years ago at a site in northern France, also attributed to Neanderthals.
The controlled use of fire was a landmark event in the human evolutionary lineage, not only for cooking and providing protection from predators, but also for providing heat that allowed hunter-gatherers to thrive in areas with colder surroundings.
“Places like Britain, for example,” said Rob Davis, an archaeologist at the British Museum and co-author of the study.
Through cooking, our ancestors were able to eliminate pathogens from meat and toxins from edible roots and tubers. Cooking made these foods more tender and digestible, freeing up bodily energy from the gut to fuel brain development.
Being able to eat a wider range of foods promoted better survival and made it possible to feed larger groups of humans, researchers say.
Fire may also have contributed to social evolution. The use of fire at night allowed these humans to gather and socialize, perhaps engaging in storytelling and developing language and belief systems.
“The campfire becomes a social center,” Davis said.
“We are 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 has in common with Neanderthals and perhaps other big-brained human relatives living at that time like the Denisovans.
The Paleolithic, or Old Stone Age, site at Barnham predates the first known Homo sapiens fossils in Africa.
Researchers believe that Neanderthals, our close evolutionary cousins, were the artisans of fire, further evidence demonstrating the intelligence and ingenuity of these archaic humans long maligned in popular culture.
Paleoanthropologist and study co-author Chris Stringer said no human fossil remains had been found at the Barnham site.
But Stringer noted that pieces of a human skull about 400,000 years old, characteristic of a Neanderthal, were discovered in the mid-20th century less than 100 miles south, in a town called Swanscombe. Stringer said Swanscombe’s skull fragments match Neanderthal fossils from a site called Sima de los Huesos, meaning “Pit of Bones,” near Burgos in Spain, dating to about 430,000 years ago.
“So the Barnham firemakers were most likely early Neanderthals, like Swanscombe and the Sima people,” Stringer said.
Neanderthals went extinct about 39,000 years ago, shortly after Homo sapiens invaded the European territory they called home. Their legacy lives on in the genomes of most of Earth’s inhabitants, thanks to crossbreeding between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals before their disappearance.
Previous archaeological work at the site has given scientists a good understanding of what the place looked like at the time the hearth was built, with a rich range of animals from elephants to small 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 showing that humans used natural fires – from wildfires or lightning strikes – but these sites lacked evidence of deliberate fires.
Researchers spent four years carrying out tests to show that the evidence from Barnham related to a deliberately set fire. They said there was plenty of evidence to support this, including geochemical tests that found there had been temperatures of more than 700 degrees Celsius (1,290 degrees Fahrenheit) with repeated fires in the same location.
