What was fire first used for

He has largely based his hypothesis on physical changes in early hominins—for instance, a shift toward smaller teeth and stomachs—that took place around the time Homo erectus evolved.

Berna and his colleagues have been excavating at Wonderwerk since , but more work is on the horizon, he said. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us!

Twice a week we compile our most fascinating features and deliver them straight to you. Live TV. These look like what happens to the ground when a campfire heats and oxidizes iron in the soil, turning it rust-like. Then they count themselves lucky if they still have roads to traverse; often parts of the roadways are washed out during the rainy season, which can add a day to their travels. At the dig site, they camp in tents, dig wells for water, and use solar panels, supplemented by generators, for energy.

The landscape was a bit different when the original campers first occupied the place some 1. They were likely Homo erectus , says Hlubik, though Homo habilis and Paranthropus boisei were also in the area. At that time, there was a river nearby. Hlubik speculates that hominins may have visited the region to collect nuts from the local palm trees. Hlubik and other archaeologists have excavated around 5, artifacts from the site—mostly chips of bone or stone flakes.

As part of their careful documentation process, the archaeologists precisely map where they find every fragment. If the hominins tended a fire, presumably they sat around it to cook, eat, chat, or work stone.

And if so, they probably left behind garbage in the form of burned bone or stone chips—rather like the crushed beer cans or plastic utensils littering the borders of some modern campfires. Back home in the lab, using infrared spectrometry to test about bone fragments, Hlubik found that 40 were definitely burned and another 80 or so might have been exposed to flames.

Those 40 burned bits are clustered together in a spot less than a meter across, which Hlubik suspects is where the hominins gathered by a hearth. Still, it is possible the items might have been burned by natural blazes, unused and untended by people. He notes that colleagues of his observed sites where bushes burned, naturally, in abandoned Incan settlements. Hlubik points out that termite mounds, typically constructed in dead trees throughout Africa, Australia, and South America, can also burn.

But the changes that Hlubik sees to bone and the surrounding dirt mean that a fire burned in the same place for at least an hour or two, she says, ruling out fast-moving grass fires. And she says sediments from a tree-stump or termite-mound fire would look different: termite mounds contain passages, for example, which remain visible due to the different sediments that fill them over time. In contrast, tree-stump sediments would be more compacted.

But it is not the only site pushing fire use back a million years or more. Wonderwerk Cave has intermittently sheltered hominins since about 2 million years ago. Entering the cave today, archaeologists skirt the big stalagmite that has stood near the entrance for the last 35, years. The walls are adorned with ancient pictures of giraffes and hash marks as well as other designs in white, red, and black.

The cave runs more than meters deep and is about 3 meters high. Archaeologists found that hominins brought quartz, ochre, and other colored minerals, for mysterious and perhaps ritual purposes, into the back of the cave about , to , years ago. The late archaeologist Peter Beaumont of the McGregor Museum in Kimberley, South Africa, who did many excavations at the site between and , had claimed there was evidence for fire in various spots, in 1. Chazan and others were skeptical.

Their goal was to examine layers of sediment from the cave, collected and preserved using a technique called micromorphology.

Fire has underpinned the development of all modern technologies—from ceramics, to metal working, to the nuclear industry. This paper starts with the view that such human fire use is an offshoot or outgrowth of far older natural fire regimes [ 9 — 15 ] figure 1 , and it aims to address two main issues: when and how humans came to be engaged with fire; and what are the main long-term impacts that their fire use has had on the natural environment?

In the first place, large numbers of lightning strikes would have made fire evident to early humans in the form of bush fires, even aside from other rarer forms of natural ignition such as volcanic activity [ 16 ]. The early encounters have been followed by an intensification of use which has had profound impacts on human culture and even biology [ 17 ]. Fire has played a major role in transforming human diet [ 18 ], and apart from its major impact on environments, it has become socially embedded, even to the point of having religious significance and being incorporated in ritual [ 1 , 19 , 20 ].

A putative general outline for the development of human fire use, showing its emergence from and interchanges with natural wildfire. All boundaries can be regarded as highly fluid: it is highly likely that there are different fire histories on different latitudes and continents. The evolution of the primates from about 70 Ma [ 21 , 22 ] provides the ultimate background for encounters with fires in landscapes. By 35 Ma ape-like and monkey-like primates had appeared. For more than 20 Myr, recognizable apes were widespread as denizens of forests [ 24 ].

Although lightning can on occasion cause tropical forest fires, in general they would not have been considerably exposed to fire in these moist densely vegetated environments [ 25 , 26 ]. Within the last 10 Myr, however, pivotal climate and vegetation changes led to new habitats and new adaptations across the Old World, and in that context the evolution of the hominids [ 27 ].

Along with C4 plants such as grasses, mammal groups such as horses were able to disperse through Africa [ 23 , 28 , 29 ], and tropical forest was replaced over large areas by wooded, bushy or more open habitats.

The earliest hominins probably diverged from apes around 6—8 Ma [ 30 ], and their evolution can be seen as a response to these changes—apes who, as the final part of a Miocene ape radiation, adapted to new wooded environments [ 31 ].

Rather than apes who came down from the trees, as traditionally seen, our ancestors were the bush country apes, and as such, through the last 3 Myr especially, some of them became exposed to more open habitats where natural fire was much more prevalent and obvious. The period 6—3 Ma, the first half of this evolution—the time of Ardipithecus and its relatives [ 32 ]—involved adaptations of bipedalism and life in wooded environments, accompanied by features such as reduction of jaws and teeth and lengthening of the thumb [ 31 — 33 ].

The second half indicates, for Homo lineages at least, a new complex of adaptation committed to long ranging, open environments, meat eating and other new foods [ 34 — 36 ]. In this context, encounters with fire must have become far more frequent and significant figure 2. The emergence of the hominins: chart indicating the relationships with chimpanzees and bonobos Pan troglodytes and Pan paniscus , and the staging of the major hominin adaptations and culture.

LCA, last common ancestor of hominins and Pan. Stone tool finds from Lomekwi 3 at West Turkana in northern Kenya push back the hard record of technology from 2. Such finds are important, because they almost certainly indicate a knowledge of working wood as well as stone, and hence of properties of friction and heat. At the same time, new finds from northern Ethiopia set the origins of our own genus, Homo , as early as 2. These discoveries square with others that indicate a dispersal of hominins across the Old World far earlier than was expected a few years ago—dates of 1.

Altogether, a more complex picture of early Homo has emerged, with regional diversity, smaller brains than were expected, and coexistence with other hominins such as the robust australopithecines for at least 1.

Stone tool transport distances show that these animals ranged over large territories which were often open in character [ 44 , 45 ]. Recent research has also given a broader picture of other primate behaviour. The sophistication of ape behaviour has been recognized, including their technology. In West Africa, Pruetz and LaDuke have shown the use of wood weapons by savanna chimpanzees, and their awareness of fire [ 46 ].

We must be alert then to possibilities that hominins could have been interacting with fire in simple ways from an early date [ 47 ]. Archaeological research has tended to concentrate narrowly on the presence or the absence of hearths, largely because of its own focus on living sites [ 48 ].

Modern fire use is highly complex, but its origins are likely to have been simple: a common biological rationale is that there is one main selective pressure for a new development of this kind [ 49 ]. For humans, fire became important for many reasons, including cooking, protection and warmth, but most of these presuppose some degree of control. Fire foraging, in contrast, demands only an attraction towards fires, in the hope of benefitting from additional resources [ 17 , 49 ].

For hominins, benefits could include retrieval of birds eggs, rodents, lizards and other small animals, as well as of invertebrates. Although fire does not create such resources, it renders them far more visible, and chance cooking might well improve their digestibility. Support for the primacy of foraging comes from the animal world.

Although only humans have full mastery of fire, and it has been said that there is no analogue, there are occasional instances, largely anecdotal, of mammalian predators such as cheetahs positioning themselves to spring on prey fleeing fires. They amount to many species across continents [ 50 ]. They show the availability of resources, the potential selective advantage, and by inference that this kind of fire harvesting would be within the cognitive capabilities of early hominins [ 51 ].

From simple interactions, the challenge to hominins would be to stretch fire, both in space and time, to enhance its utility. In Alaska—a reasonable proxy for parts of ice age Europe—the fires burn largely from June to September. Thus, fire would not be available through the cold parts of the year, unless it could be maintained effectively.

In Africa, the challenge might be to maintain fires through the wet seasons. Any such efforts, indeed almost all fire management, pushes towards a division of labour. Slow-burning materials such as animal dung or plant material tapers need to be selected and guarded, while other subsistence activities go on. Without doubt, natural fire was available on the landscapes inhabited by hominins.

Of the millions of lightning strikes that are recorded each year [ 16 ], many lead to bush and forest fires, especially at the start of a rainy season: then lightning from the first thunder storms often strikes when much of the vegetation remains dry [ 52 — 58 ]. Most of the instances of relevance are in forest, woodland and savanna, but the fire regimes operate surprisingly far north. In total, the early archaeological record documents many thousands of events of hominin activity, but the chances of fire being preserved are exceptionally small.

As stone tools endure far better, their record is full enough to give some insights into sampling. When the Lomekwi 3 site at West Turkana in Kenya was published it took the record back from 2.

If hominins had actually made tools say 10 times a year, then with a population of say 10 , current sampling would give a 1 in 70 billion chance of recovery. If that seems excessively hypothetical, we can come forward to the period 2—1 Ma: there are some hundreds of archaeological occurrences in total, but currently a maximum of five preserving evidence of burning mentioned below. Fire is therefore about 10— times less likely to feature than hard artefacts.

In that light, it seems remarkable that overall we do have so much fire in the record. The basis of the cooking hypothesis as set out by Wrangham and colleagues is that hominins living in more open environments would be unable to feed through the year from the fruit and herb resources which sustain apes in tropical forest.

They would need to adopt other foods, particularly during dry seasons [ 34 ]. Extending their use of meat and particularly of carbohydrates in the form of roots and tubers would be necessary for filling this gap [ 35 , 36 , 60 ]. Large teeth—megadonty—hint at dietary stress in the period before 3 Ma, and isotopic studies at the incorporation of new foods such as grasses and sedges [ 61 , 62 ]. From as early as 2. But the new foods are hard to digest.

Cooking greatly increases their digestibility: in the view of Wrangham and colleagues, this would have come with Homo erectus at about 1. Part of the evidence advanced is that a modern human body plan emerges at this time, with features including lengthened hindlimbs [ 67 ], and reduction of sexual dimorphism [ 68 ].

In particular, the teeth of Homo erectus are reduced in size, sometimes as much as those of modern humans making allowance for body size [ 68 ], cf. In a sense, the cooking hypothesis is proved, in that all modern humans need cooked food [ 66 ]: the question therefore is whether the hypothesis can be locked into a fixed position in the past, a rapid switch of adaptation.

This is far harder to demonstrate, given our inadequate picture of early hominin species variation, and the variety of environments which they inhabited.

As a working hypothesis, however, this set of ideas brings to life the problems that early hominins were working against in terms of processing foods, and living alongside large predators. A striking increase in human brain size is also one of the major developments in Homo.

It has risen from an average ca to cc in the course of the Pleistocene [ 70 , 71 ]. As a larger brain is costly in energy, it needs explanation. The social brain hypothesis aims to explain the phenomenon in terms of increases in group size and pressures towards social cognition [ 72 — 74 ]. High-quality diets are a necessity of fuelling the larger brain, from early times and especially from half a million years ago [ 68 , 72 , 75 ].

Social brain calculations suggest rapid change at this stage, and a link with language origins [ 71 , 76 ]. Fire on landscape is of deep interest, but it is practically impossible to distinguish between wildfires and similar fires that may have been started by humans.

Some of our best clues as to how this might be done come from Australia. In a modern instance, the Martu people of the western desert only gave up their traditional fire stick farming methods in the s.

The change led to a great rise in the size of individual fires [ 78 , 79 ]. Through the systematic use of small fires the aborigines had habitually managed small mammal communities in a way that appears to enhance resources [ 80 ]; other hunter—gatherer studies imply also a concern for enhancing vegetation [ 54 ]. More generally, archaeological methodology has to focus on the restricted domains of sites where there has been notable human activity—possible home bases.

The idea of the home base has been much debated [ 80 — 82 ], but dense concentrations of stone tools as much as 2. On occasion archaeology is capable of recognizing artefact evidence of fire beyond all doubt. The sockets where the fire drill was inserted are plainly visible. Pitch, probably used as a fixative in hafting, can be made from tree bark only by maintaining high temperatures in a controlled fire for several hours.

This can be regarded as almost the ideal case of fire documentation, since one piece of pitch retained a human fingerprint, and direct radiocarbon dating gave an age of ca 48 BP, on the limits of the technique, and compatible with a geological age of approximately 80 years. The use of gypsum plaster for hafting in the Middle East also implies the use of fire [ 88 ].

Occasionally, elsewhere, wooden artefacts may be part burnt or burnt. At Kalambo Falls in Zambia burnt wooden artefacts were found on Acheulean sites dating to ca 0. At Beeches Pit, mentioned below, a refitting flint artefact set included two burnt specimens in the set of 27, a circumstance not readily consistent with natural fire [ 91 , 92 ]. Such examples emphasize the importance of context, and the point that an organized methodology is necessary for fire enquiries.

In archaeology, a first general treatment was provided by Bellomo in the s [ 93 , 94 ]; subsequently, micromorphological studies of sediments, magnetic methods—including magnetic susceptibility and palaeomagnetic techniques—and thermoluminescence measurements have all proved highly useful [ 95 , 96 ]. No technique on its own completely addresses the problems of enquiry. The strength of micromorphology is obviously its ability to look at the small scale.

The scaling up to provide evidence of specific human actions is therefore more likely to come from archaeology; but multiple techniques are necessary for any full picture. Thermoluminescence and magnetic methods can provide estimates of critical factors such as temperatures and duration of burning [ 97 ]. These are both open sites. According to the original publications, FxJj20 preserves burned sediments and some heat-altered stone tools [ 98 , 99 ]. The site remains a strong candidate for early fire use and is currently under complete reinvestigation S.

Hlubik , personal communication. Chesowanja preserves somewhat similar information, but the burnt material at the centre of the site consists not of a burnt patch, but of a few large clasts of baked clay [ , ]. The possibility that they could come from an adjacent but lost natural burning feature is difficult to exclude on present evidence, although the clasts are directly associated with numerous stone tools and faunal remains.

A site at Gadeb in Ethiopia is also of similar age [ ]. Some major Pleistocene sites with traces of fire. Following earliest traces at Koobi Fora and Chesowanja, ca 1. In the Far East, Zhoukoudian ca 0. Several sites then range through the period approximately 1. They include the very different cave sites of Swartkrans and Wonderwerk in southern Africa, and the open site of Kalambo Falls in Zambia mentioned above. At Swartkrans, in Member 3, described as a roofed gully, fragments of burnt bone were found in 17 excavation squares, arguing against their creation by occasional savanna fires sweeping up to the site [ — ].

They include several specimens also showing cutmarks from butchery. At Wonderwerk Cave, micromorphology studies in stratum 10, dating to approximately 1 Ma, indicate that quantities of grass and other vegetation were introduced far into the cave and became burnt along with bone preserved as microscopic fragments [ , ]. The important site of Gesher Benot Ya'aqov in Israel preserves burnt materials at numerous levels in a 30 m sequence dating to ca years [ — ].

Charcoal was identified at 10 levels, and burnt wood at 4. Macroscopic burnt flints and burnt pebbles have also been found, for example, 24 in total from the layer I1—6 L-7 [ ]. Zhoukoudian near Beijing in China has been known for more than 80 years as a fire site [ , ].

Nonetheless, the site is a record of the activities of Homo erectus in the period 0. The repeated associations argue for controlled fire [ ]. From around years ago, traces of fire become much more numerous on many sites, including numbers in Europe and the Middle East as well as Africa and Asia [ 80 , , ]. Qesem in Israel preserves a large hearth maintained over a period [ , ]; fire traces also appear regularly at nearby Tabun Cave at about the same time [ ]. In northwest Europe, Beeches Pit, a year old interglacial site in eastern England, has various traces of fire, suggesting that large hearths were maintained by the side of a creek.

The traces include burnt bone, shells, combustion features, and most particularly the evidence of a refitting set of flint artefacts [ 91 , 92 , ]. Of 27 flakes discarded in the process of shaping an intended handaxe, only two became heated and reddened, indicating highly localized burning. Despite the increasing numbers of fire sites, their relative scarcity is still notable [ ], as is the fact that some very major sites in Europe are totally lacking in fire evidence. These include lower levels at the Caune d'Arago at Tautavel in southern France, where among more than half a million finds of flints and bone there are no burnt traces older than years [ ].

At a later date, too, there are significant gaps in the fire representation in Mousterian sites [ ]. By contrast, at approximately years ago, Vertesszollos in Hungary, Terra Amata and Menez Dregan in France and Bolomor in Spain show frequent evidence of fire [ , — ], continued in Spain on later Neanderthal sites such as Abric Romani [ ].

It has been argued a number of times that fire management may have improved markedly around years ago [ 81 , — , ]. The Levallois technique of stone working originates around the same period, and gives strong indications of the beginnings of hafting [ — ] figure 4.

Effective hafted systems require glue or twine—it may be highly significant that two of the main glues require heat treatment for their production [ 87 , 88 ]. Hafting of a Levallois point: the implicit connections with fire. Hafting of Levallois may occur as early as years ago [ — ]. Two glues in use by 50— ka require fire for preparation; twine, implied to be in use by ka [ ] is a requisite for working a fire drill.

Hafting and the use of a fire drill involve a similar conceptual mastery of bringing together two components via a vital intermediary—fixative in the one and kindling in the other. The question of ignition is an important one [ , ], but perhaps less crucial to effective fire use than often assumed.

If hominins could not ignite fire, however, they would need to be able to maintain it robustly, and hence probably be reliant on a strong social network allowing its replacement [ ]. They would need good knowledge of slow-burning materials, although field studies show that animal dung is useful in this respect. Ignition is often assumed to have required a cognitive advance.

It does not seem a more complex process than hafting, which it closely resembles in that two component parts require understanding and use of an intermediary: fixative in the one, and tinder in the other figure 5.

Full impact of fire use may come only when agricultural economies are followed by industrial ones. Here evidence of two records of metal exploitation demonstrates effects through the last years.

The lead aerosol record of Arctic ice cores gives a dated index to production of lead and silver through the last years [ ], and as such may provide an effective guide to the relative scales of burning of wood in industrial processes through that period, long before the atmospheric effects of fossil fuel burning are seen.

By years ago, pierced shell beads [ ] indicate a knowledge of twine or leather cord, which would have been necessary for operating a fire drill. Before this date at Pinnacle Point in South Africa, stone was being warmed to improve its working qualities [ ]. Such finds are a further early indication of the use of fire in technological processes: with its need for fuelling and maintenance domestic fire becomes a firm stimulus towards division of labour, planning and focusing of attention [ 17 ].

From this point, fire use can be seen as almost universal, as it is among living modern humans e. Even so, there are puzzles in the record, where fire is seemingly inexplicably absent as in some parts of the record in Middle Palaeolithic France [ ] , and it remains possible—balanced against the vicissitudes of sampling and preservation—that the costs and risks of using it sometimes outweighed the benefits.

Though they clearly used fire, Prof Sandgathe argues Neanderthals were incapable of making fire on their own.

His excavations of Neanderthal sites at the Roc de Marsal in France, described in the journal PaeloAnthropology in , reveal more traces of fire from interglacial periods than glacial ones. Why would Neanderthals use fire less during cold periods? Because there are more thunderstorms and more dry vegetation to spark wildfires during warmer periods.

If Neanderthals could make fire, they would have done so to a greater degree during cold times, leaving more traces of fire in the fossil record during glacial periods.

But we do not, says Prof Sandgathe, therefore Neanderthals could not make fire at will. Making fire is something you have to learn.

More recently, in a number of papers published in in the journal Current Anthropology , Sandathe reviewed all the evidence to date and in particular the presentations at a symposium on fire use by hominins, and he maintains that the most likely answer is still that Neanderthals could not make fire.

There is ample evidence that Neanderthals were hardly the brutish, dim-witted ogres we once believed them to be. More recent discoveries have indicated they ritually buried their dead, carried medicines such as aspirin and penicillin, wore manganese dioxide body paint, had larger brains than us, and created cave paintings long before humans had even arrived in Europe.

Still, argues Sandgathe, they could not make fire from scratch. And it was the mastery of fire by humans that allowed them to colonise Europe and eventually out-compete them. This could have been because we alone controlled fire. Dutch archaeologist Professor Wil Roebroeks of the University of Leiden says evidence suggests European Neanderthals could not only create fire, but were just as adept as us at using it.

He says the evidence suggests Neanderthals were creating birch bark pitch using fire tens of thousands of years before humans at Pinnacle Point in South Africa used it to fashion tools. Manganese dioxide — commonly used today in fireworks — lowers the ignition temperature of wood from C to C, meaning that sprinkling a bit of the mineral onto a pile of tinder makes it easier to start a fire.

If they were indeed creating fires in this way, it pushes the date of fire creation by Neanderthals to , years ago. It might seem slightly far-fetched to imagine that our thick-browed cousins would have this understanding of chemistry, but Andrew Sorensen of the University of Leiden agrees. Making a fire using the 'wood on wood' method requires a huge amount of effort.

Moreover, sulphuric iron nodules, also called pyrite, make excellent hammerstones for the 'strike a light' method of fire creation and they are abundant in the fossil record.