TECHNOLOGY × HUMAN EVOLUTION

The Control of Fire

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

Phanerozoic · Cenozoic · Quaternary · Pleistocene · Calabrian

The oldest secure trace of fire at a site occupied by hominins, humans and their extinct relatives, is a hearth one million years old in Wonderwerk cave, in South Africa, but fire came into daily use only about 400,000 years ago.

A hearth burned in Wonderwerk cave, in South Africa, one million years ago. Burnt bone and plant ash attest the hearth, and they are the oldest secure trace of fire at a site occupied by hominins. Using fire occasionally and using it every day are different things, and only daily use implies that hominins depended on fire. Roebroeks and Villa (2011) examined the European sites. They show that hominins reached latitudes with freezing winters without using fire regularly, and that fire entered daily use only about four hundred thousand years ago.

Why it matters

Fire is the first source of energy outside the body that any animal has controlled. According to a long-standing hypothesis, part of human anatomy depends on fire. Cooking does part of the work of digestion, which may explain why our digestive tract and our dentition, the set of our teeth, are small for our body mass. The dates show that any such change was slow. Hominins survived European winters before they could rely on fire.

Dating & uncertaintyDisputed

Ash and burnt bone recovered deep inside Wonderwerk cave show that a fire burned there one million years ago. Burnt seeds and flints at Gesher Benot Ya'aqov, in Israel, indicate controlled fire about 790,000 years ago. The date at which fire came into daily use is harder to establish. In Europe, daily use is unambiguously established only after about 400,000 years ago.

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