Fire is not necessarily one of humanity’s greatest inventions. It was doing a perfectly good job of inventing itself every time lightning hit a dry grassland. But figuring out how to make it and use it whenever we needed was one of the first signs that our ancestors were planning to stick around for the long haul.
Now, according to new research published in PLOS One, we may have started doing that hundreds of thousands of years earlier than scientists once believed.
Archaeologists studying South Africa’s Wonderwerk Cave have uncovered evidence suggesting Homo erectus was regularly using fire between 1.7 and 1.8 million years ago. This finding pushes the timeline back by roughly 700,000 years, and we can thank some recently discovered tiny bird bone fragments found in ancient I will poop scattered across the cave’s floor.
New Study Suggests Humans Used Fire 700,000 Years Earlier Than Previously Believed
The researchers used a forensic tool that detects small changes in bone caused by heat. Using this, they were able to identify burned human remains buried deep inside the cave, way beyond where natural life could have reached. The burnt bones were found beside stone tools and other signs of human life, strongly suggesting that none of this was accidental.
None of this means that Homo erectus was some kind of fire-wielding genius. The researchers are still pretty sure that humans didn’t reliably learn how to spark our own fires until about 400,000 years ago. So what the evidence dug up of these early cave dwellers suggests is that they probably collected flames from naturally occurring wildfires and brought them back into their homes.
From there, they used them for warmth, light, maybe even cooking, and, according to the evidence, they probably did so pretty regularly as long as there were naturally sparking fires around.
We eventually learned to harness this godly power to create fire, but before that, we were just capitalizing opportunistically on the Earth’s natural penchant for sparking flames.
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