FIRST FIRES
The ability to use fire forever changed the fate of our species: For starters, it allowed our ancestors to cook food, which made them much more efficient eaters. Instead of gnawing on nuts and berries all day, they could now cook animal meat, which packs much more of a caloric punch.
They also used fire to make more effective weapons and tools. But there’s a lot we don’t know about humans’ early encounters with fire and its transition into effective, everyday use.
What we do know is that H. sapiens weren’t the only hominins who fanned flames. Early humans were at least aware of fire — about 2 million years ago, well before the arrival of modern humans, says John Gowlett, an archaeologist at the University of Liverpool in the U.K. who specializes in the origins of human fire use. This was around the time of Homo erectus, the first hominin with modern human proportions.
“At first, early humans were fire foragers, meaning they knew fire could be beneficial. When they encountered it on the landscape, they would watch or follow it,” Gowlett says. After stumbling across a wildfire, these early humans might have revisited the site to see what nature had cooked up for them. The evidence for the ability of early human ancestors to make fires for themselves, on the other hand, appears around 800,000 years ago, or even as early as 1.5 million years ago. It’s around that time that hominins began to cook and to gather around fires.
None of these first firestarters were H. sapiens, nor
were they H. neanderthalensis, which were not yet present in the archaeological record. When they did appear, however, both species showed similar skill in cooking, says Filipe
Natalio, an archaeologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. Neanderthals tended to their flames in Europe, and modern humans fed fires in Africa from around 400,000 to 300,000 years ago. When the two species came together in the Levant region, says Natalio, both were seasoned experts in applying flame to their food.
ADDITIONALLY, archaeologists have found evidence of sophisticated tools made using fire. At one
Israeli archaeological site, a population of H. sapiens, H. neanderthalensis, or some other species used flames to fortify their blades around 400,000 to 200,000 years ago. By this time, they had also learned to control the temperature of the fire so their tools wouldn’t explode in the direct heat.
As modern archaeological technology continues to evolve, scientists can look further and further back in the human history of fire. According to both Gowlett and Natalio, archaeologists continue to find sites that show that human fires have been burning a lot longer than previously thought.
THE EVIDENCE FOR THE ABILITY OF EARLY HUMAN ANCESTORS TO MAKE FIRES FOR THEMSELVES APPEARS AROUND 800,000 YEARS AGO, OR EVEN AS EARLY AS 1.5 MILLION YEARS AGO.