A new archaeological discovery has radically rewritten the timeline of when humans first began using fire, pushing the earliest known use of fire to roughly 400,000 years ago—eight times older than the previously-oldest evidence for fire use by humans, dated to only 50,000 years ago. This discovery has profound implications for human evolution—both in terms of the use of fire as a technology and as a focal point for social development.

After a four-year study of evidence gathered from the Paleolithic archaeological site of Barnham in England’s county of Suffolk, a team with the British Museum concluded that a number of artifacts, consisting of a patch of baked clay and flint hand axes that had been fractured by intense heat, had been produced by temperatures that exceeded 700 degrees Celsius (1,292 Fahrenheit), showing a pattern that was consistent with the repeated use of a constructed hearth rather than naturally-occurring wildfires.

This conclusion was bolstered by the discovery of two fragments of iron pyrite at the site, a mineral that not only produces sparks when struck against a piece of flint, but also one that does not occur naturally at Barnham, meaning that someone deliberately brought it to the site from elsewhere.

Evidence of artificially-started fires is relatively rare in the archaeological record, as the ash, coals and cinders that are produced in such fires are quickly dispersed by the weather after the fire is extinguished; however, sediments from an ancient pond preserved the products of Barnham’s primitive hearth.

Although it is difficult to determine who was making use of fire in ancient Barnham, fossil evidence from both England and Spain suggests that Barnham’s inhabitants at the time were early Neanderthals, a human subspecies that evolved alongside the ancestors of modern humans. Even if the use of fire was a development made by our Homo neanderthalensis brothers and sisters, our H. sapiens ancestors would have learned how to tame the energy source soon afterward as the two groups intermingled (a concept explored by Whitley in his 2018 novel, New). 

This earlier use of fire offers profound implications for the timeline of human evolution: in addition to cooking food, hearths are assumed to have revolutionized human social interaction, providing a location for groups to gather to interact, plan for activities and share stories, much as we still do today.