By Will Dunham
Dec 10 (Reuters) – Scientists have found the oldest known evidence of fire-making by prehistoric humans in the English county of Suffolk – a hearth built by Neanderthals around 415,000 years ago – a milestone for our evolutionary lineage much earlier than previously known.
In an old clay pit for making bricks near the village of Burnham, the researchers found a patch of hot clay, some hot shattered handaxes and two pieces of iron pyrite – a mineral that creates sparks when struck over flint to ignite tinder – which they used frequently.
It was near the water hole where these people camped.
“We think people brought pyrite to the site for the purpose of making fire. And that had a huge impact on pushing back the earliest fire-making,” 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 fire-making was around 50,000 years ago at a site in northern France, also attributed to Neanderthals.
The controlled use of fire was a historic event for the human evolutionary lineage, not only for cooking and providing protection from predators but also for providing warmth that enabled hunter-gatherers to thrive in cold climates.
“Places like Britain, for example,” said Rob Davies, a British Museum archaeologist and co-author of the study.
By cooking, our ancestors were able to remove pathogens from meat and toxins from edible roots and tubers. Cooking makes these foods more tender and digestible, which draws the body’s energy from the stomach and fuels brain development.
Being able to consume a greater range of foods supported better survival and allowed larger groups of humans to feed, 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 engaging in storytelling and developing 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, adding that the new findings show that this trait is similar to our species, Homo sapiens, Neanderthals, and possibly other big-brained human relatives who lived at the time, such as the Denisovans.
The Palaeolithic, or Old Stone Age, site of Burnham predates the earliest known Homo sapiens fossils in Africa.
Researchers believe that Neanderthals, our close evolutionary cousins, were fire-makers, another piece of evidence showing the intelligence and ingenuity of these ancient humans long discredited in popular culture.
Paleoanthropologist and study co-author Chris Stringer said no human fossils were found at the Burnham site.
But Stringer noted that fragments of Neanderthal human skulls, some 400,000 years old, were found less than 100 miles (160 km) to the south in a town called Swanscombe in the mid-20th century. Stringer said the Swanscombe skull fragments match Neanderthal fossils from a site called Cima de los Huesos, meaning “pit of the bones,” near Burgos, Spain, dating to about 430,000 years ago.
“So the Burnham fire-makers were likely to be early Neanderthals, like the Swanscombe and Sima people,” Stringer said.
Not long after the Neanderthals went extinct about 39,000 years ago, Homo sapiens entered 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 scientists a better understanding of what the place was like when the hearth was built, with fauna ranging from elephants to small mammals and birds, and evidence of human activity in the form of cut marks on animal bones.
There is archeological evidence from Africa that humans used naturally occurring fires more than a million years ago – from wildfires or lightning strikes – but the sites lacked evidence of deliberate fire-making.
Investigators spent four years conducting tests to show Burnham’s evidence was intentionally set on fire. They say that several pieces of evidence, including geochemical tests, show that there were repeated fires at the same location at temperatures in excess of 700 degrees Celsius (1,290 degrees Fahrenheit).
(Reporting by Will Dunham in Washington; Editing by Daniel Wallis)
