“This is a 400,000-year-old site, the oldest evidence of fire found not only in Britain and Europe, but actually anywhere in the world,” said Nick Ashton, one of the study’s authors and a curator at the British Museum. Ashton added that the first hard evidence that our ancestors started fire is pushed back by about 350,000 years.
Researchers don’t know what these hominin ancestors used fire for. Perhaps they roasted venison, carved tools, and shared stories by firelight.
Exactly when our ancestors developed the ability to use fire is an important question that could help solve the mysteries of human evolution and behavior.
One theory is that the evolutionary ability to start fire led to increased brain size in our human ancestors, because cooking makes digestion easier and increases caloric intake. Another idea is that controlling fire may also have helped create a space to congregate at night, which may have made humans more social and facilitated the evolution of cognition.
“We know that brain size was increasing towards its current level during this period,” said Chris Stringer, research leader in human evolution at London’s Natural History Museum and another author of the Nature study. “Our brains are energetically expensive. The brain uses about 20 percent of the body’s energy. So having the ability to use fire, to start fires, helps release nutrients from food, provides energy to the brain, helps move the brain, and actually, you know, allows for the evolution of larger brains.”
Stringer said the discovery does not mark the beginning of humans’ ability to start fire, but is just the earliest example of which researchers are confident. There are other early indications that our ancestors used fire in what is now South Africa, Israel, and Kenya, but these examples are subject to debate and interpretation.
From an archaeological perspective, it is difficult to determine what caused the wildfires or whether humans started them.
“The question is, are they collecting it from a natural source, or are they simply carrying it around and managing it? Or are they making it up? On the surface, this is a very convincing case that the group knew how to start fire,” said Dennis Sandogyas, a senior lecturer in the archeology department at Canada’s Simon Fraser University who was not involved in the study.
In this new Nature study, researchers point to the presence of deposits containing fire residue, fire-cracked stone tools such as a flint hatchet, and two small fragments of pyrite that geological analysis suggests is extremely rare and likely brought to the site by humans to start fires.
Other outside researchers were less convinced.
Much of the evidence here is “circumstantial”, Will Loebloeks, professor emeritus of paleolithic archeology at Leiden University in the Netherlands, wrote in an email.
Lowbrokes pointed out that later Neanderthal sites, dated to about 50,000 years ago, contained flint tools with signs of wear indicating that they had struck pyrite to generate sparks, making them the “determinant” for humans to create fire. But that’s not the case here.
“Although the authors did an excellent job analyzing the Burnham data, they seem to be stretching the evidence by claiming that this is the ‘earliest evidence of a fire outbreak,'” Lobruks wrote.
For our ancestors, fire was essential for keeping warm, providing nutrition, deterring predators, and melting resins into adhesives.
But Sandgate said it’s important to recognize that the development of fire starting is not a linear process, but rather a sporadic one with adaptations and initiations. There is evidence that after our ancestral groups learned how to make fire, they either lost that ability or stopped using fire for cultural reasons.
“We have to be careful not to take any one example … and just project it as a sign that from this point on everyone starts fires,” Sandogyas said, adding that he reviewed studies of nearly 100 modern hunter-gatherer groups whose lifestyles have been well documented by observers. Some groups did not have the ability to start a fire.
“It’s likely that firemaking was discovered, lost, rediscovered, and lost by multiple groups in different regions over time. I’m sure it’s a very complex history.”
