TECHNOLOGY × HUMAN EVOLUTION

The Control of Fire

~1 million years ago (habitual use by ~400,000 years ago)

Phanerozoic · Cenozoic · Quaternary · Pleistocene · Calabrian

Burnt bone and plant ash inside Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa, a million years old, are the oldest secure trace of fire in a place where hominins lived. But controlling a fire and depending on one are different things: reviewing the European sites shows hominins moving into latitudes that froze in winter without fire as a routine tool, and fire becoming part of everyday equipment only from about four hundred thousand years ago.

Why it matters

Fire is the first energy source outside its own body that any animal ever controlled, and our anatomy is shaped around it: cooking does part of the work of digestion, which is why our guts and our teeth are small for our size. What the dates say is that the shaping was slow. People survived European winters before they could count on a fire.

Dating & uncertaintyDisputed

Ash and burnt bone deep inside Wonderwerk Cave suggest fire in place a million years ago, and burnt seeds and flint at Gesher Benot Ya'aqov by about 790 ka, but habitual everyday use only becomes unambiguous in Europe after roughly 400 ka.

Sources

1. Berna et al. (2012), PNAS · Microstratigraphic evidence of in situ fire in the Acheulean strata of Wonderwerk Cave, Northern Cape province, South Africa
2. Goren-Inbar et al. (2004), Science · Evidence of hominin control of fire at Gesher Benot Ya'aqov, Israel
3. Roebroeks & Villa (2011), PNAS · On the earliest evidence for habitual use of fire in Europe
4. Gowlett (2016), Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B · The discovery of fire by humans: a long and convoluted process

Earth history as one day

23:59:4019.0 s before midnight

if Earth’s 4.54 billion years were compressed into a single day