Humans created fire 400,000 years ago, earlier than previously thought: Here's what new study reveals

Researchers have now discovered the earliest known instance of human-made fire, rewriting the timeline of when humans first created fire.

The new discovery, in the village of Barnham, pushes the origin of human fire-making back by more than 350,000 years, far earlier than previously thought, BBC reported.

According to a groundbreaking discovery in a field in Suffolk, humans had mastered the art of creating fire 400,000 years ago, almost 350,000 years earlier than previously known.

It is known that humans used natural fire more than 1 million years ago, but until now, the earliest unambiguous example of humans lighting fires came from a site in northern France, dating from 50,000 years ago, the Guardian reported.

It stated that the latest evidence, which includes a patch of scorched earth and fire-cracked hand-axes, makes a compelling case that humans were creating fire far earlier.

The team reportedly said they found "baked earth together with the earliest Stone Age lighter – consisting of a flint that was bashed against a rock called pyrite, also known as fool's gold, to create a spark," BBC stated.

“The implications are enormous,” Dr Rob Davis, a Palaeolithic archaeologist at the British Museum who co-led the investigation, was quoted by the Guardian as saying.

“The ability to create and control fire is one of the most important turning points in human history with practical and social benefits that changed human evolution," he added.

Homo sapiens or Neanderthals?

The people who made the fire at the site, in the village of Barnham, Suffolk, are unlikely to have been our own ancestors, as Homo sapiens did not have a sustained presence outside Africa until about 100,000 years ago.

Instead, the inhabitants were likely early Neanderthals, based on fossils of a similar age from Swanscombe, Kent, and Atapuerca, Spain, which preserve early Neanderthal DNA.

“So early Neanderthals were making fire in Britain about 400,000 years ago,” said Prof Chris Stringer, of the Natural History Museum and part of the team behind the findings.

“Of course, our species was evolving in Africa, while these people were living in Britain and Europe. We guess that our species, too, would have had this knowledge, but we don’t actually have the evidence of it.”

Key evidence

Heat-damaged hand axes and pyrite were discovered in the area but they were not enough to prove that humans were making fire there. What the archaeologists needed was evidence of a fire that burnt for a few hours and then went out hundreds of thousands of years ago.

In one corner of one pit at the site, that is what Prof Ashton found when he wandered away from the main dig to have a sit down under a tree, BBC reported.

"This is the area where we discovered this heated sediment and you can tell it's heated because normally the clay is quite yellowy orange, and this was a distinct red," he was quoted as saying.

Prof Ashton then pointed to the key evidence: a thin layer of clay - a single layer among many in the wall of one of the pits.