Knowing how to strike a light 💫

"Archaeologists suspect that the first hominins to use fire took advantage of nearby wildfires: Picture a Homo erectus lighting a branch on a nearby wildfire (which must have taken serious guts), then carefully carrying that torch back to camp to cook or make it easier to ward off predators for a night.

"Evidence of that sort of thing —using fire, but not necessarily being able to summon it on command —dates back more than a million years at sites like Koobi Fora in Kenya and Swartkrans in South Africa.

"Learning to start a fire whenever you want one is harder, but it’s essential if you want to cook your food regularly without having to wait for the next lightning strike to spark a brushfire. It can also help maintain the careful control of temperature needed to make birch tar adhesives.

"'The advantage of fire-making lies in its predictability,' as [Rob] Davis and his colleagues wrote in their paper. 

"Knowing how to strike a light changed fire from an occasional luxury item to a staple of hominin life.

"There are hints that Neanderthals in Europe were using fire by around 400,000 years ago, based on traces of long-cold hearths at sites in France, Portugal, Spain, the UK, and Ukraine… But none of those sites offer evidence that Neanderthals were making fire rather than just taking advantage of its natural appearance. 

"That kind of evidence doesn’t show up in the archaeological record until 50,000 years ago, when groups of Neanderthals in France used pyrite and bifaces…to light their own hearth fires; marks left on the bifaces tell the tale.

"Barnham pushes that date back dramatically, but there’s probably even older evidence out there. Davis and his colleagues say the Barnham Neanderthals probably didn’t invent firestarting; they likely brought the knowledge with them from mainland Europe."



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