TECHNOLOGY × HUMAN EVOLUTION

The Control of Fire

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

Phanerozoic · Cenozoic · Quaternary · Pleistocene · Calabrian

A million years ago, fire burned inside Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa, and the burnt bone and plant ash it left are the oldest secure trace of fire in a place where hominins lived. But controlling a fire and depending on one are different things: a review of 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 a long-standing hypothesis has our anatomy shaped around it: cooking does part of the work of digestion, which may be why our guts and our teeth are small for our size. What the dates say is that any such shaping came slowly. People survived European winters before they could count on a fire.

Dating & uncertaintyDisputed

Ash and burnt bone deep inside Wonderwerk Cave place a fire there a million years ago; burnt seeds and flint at Gesher Benot Ya'aqov suggest a fire under control by about 790 ka. Dating the moment fire became routine is the hard part: in Europe, everyday use only becomes unambiguous 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