Scientists announced on Wednesday that they had discovered evidence in the UK of humans deliberately making fire 400,000 years ago, dramatically pushing back the timeline for when our ancient relatives are known to have mastered this crucial skill.
Learning to light our own fires was one of the great turning points in human history, offering our ancestors warmth, a place to socialise and a way to cook food – which helped us evolve our unusually big brains.
There are signs that humans were using fire more than a million years ago in Africa, but it is believed these flames were originally lit by natural causes such as lightning.
Finding solid evidence that our ancestors were sparking their own fires has proven extremely difficult, possibly because the tools did not last throughout the millennia.
That is why a team led by researchers from the British Museum was so pleased to find a human fireplace dating back 400,000 years near the village of Barnham, in Suffolk, eastern England.
Previously, the oldest evidence of fire-making anywhere in the world was found in France – and dated back 50,000 years.