When Did Humans Learn To Use Fire

In the 1981 movie Quest for Fire, a group of Neanderthals struggles to keep a small ember burning while moving across a cold, bleak landscape. The meaning is clear: If the ember goes out, they will lose their ability to cook, stay warm, protect themselves from wolves—in brusque, to survive. The movie too makes it obvious that these Neanderthals do not know how to make burn down.

During the Center Paleolithic, roughly 250,000 to 40,000 years ago, when Neanderthals occupied Europe and much of western Asia, the climate included a couple of major warm periods like to today, merely was dominated by ii major cold periods that included dozens of shifts betwixt cold and very cold conditions. Quest for Burn presented a more often than not accurate portrayal of Europe during one of the cold periods (eighty,000 years ago, according to the film'southward championship menu), but almost all researchers agreed that the movie was apartment-out wrong in its proposition that Neanderthals were incapable of making burn down. Now, new fieldwork our squad has done in France contradicts some long-held assumptions and shows that the film might have had information technology right all along.

Conventional thinking has long held that our human ancestors gained control of fire—including the ability to create it—very early on in prehistory, long earlier Neanderthals came along some 250,000 years ago. For many researchers, this view has been supported past the discovery of a handful of sites in Africa with fire residues that are more a meg years old. But it has also been buoyed by the unproblematic logic of one idea: It is hard to imagine that our ancestors could have left Africa and colonized the higher, and oft much colder, latitudes of Europe and Asia without fire.

The Neanderthals, afterward all, lived in Europe during multiple periods in which seasonal temperatures were similar to those that exist today in northern Sweden. (Northern Europe was covered in massive ice sheets during those periods.) There were vast, frigid grasslands populated by herds of reindeer, horses, and woolly mammoths. Fire would have allowed Neanderthals to cook those animals, making the meat easier to chew and more nutritious. And, possibly more than importantly, it would take helped the Neanderthals stay warm during the coldest periods.

This line of thought is the basis for the long-prevailing notion that our power to make fire began long before the Neanderthals, as a spark—a single technological discovery that spread widely and apace and has remained essential to human being life, in an uninterrupted line, to the present day. Just more recent evidence—some of it coming from our ain fieldwork—indicates that hominins' use of fire was non marked by a single discovery. It more probable consisted of several stages of evolution, and while we don't yet know when these stages occurred, each of them may take lasted for hundreds of thousands of years.

Neanderthal fire - Chimpanzees cannot make fire but they clearly understand its behavior. — Chimpanzees cannot brand fire but they clearly sympathize its behavior. Jill Pruetz

Weastward surmise that during the first phase, our ancestors were able to interact safely with fire; in other words, instead of merely running from it, they had become familiar with how information technology works. To go a deeper understanding of this stage, we tin expect to inquiry done on chimpanzees—our closest living relatives—past Jill Pruetz, a primatologist at Iowa Country Academy, who has studied chimps' interaction with wildfires in West Africa. Pruetz has found that chimps clearly empathise the beliefs of fire enough to have lost the fear of it that most animals typically possess. In fact, Pruetz has observed chimps monitoring the progress of a passing wildfire from a few meters abroad and and then moving in to forage in the burned-out area. And so while chimps cannot build or contain fires, they understand how fire moves beyond the landscape, and they use this noesis to their benefit. It is not hard to imagine a similar scenario playing out among small groups of our own early ancestors, perhaps the australopithecines, who lived from around 4 1000000 years ago until about 2 meg years ago in East Africa. The outset stage may have persisted throughout much of prehistory.

The 2nd phase would be when people could actually control fire—pregnant they could capture information technology, contain it, and supply it with fuel to keep it going within their living areas—but they were notwithstanding obtaining it from natural sources like forest fires. It is difficult to institute when this stage occurred, for a couple of reasons. One is that some claims for very old fires were just incorrect. For case, at the famous Chinese site Zhoukoudian, what were originally thought to be the remains of 700,000-yr-onetime Homo erectus fires turned out to be natural sediments resembling charcoal and ash.

Second, and possibly most crucial, is that some of the earliest fire residues have been found in open-air settings—not inside caves—and consist of isolated fragments, minor scatters of burned bones, or patches of discolored sediments. While it is possible that these residues are the remains of hominin campfires, it is equally possible, if not probable, that they were produced past naturally occurring wildfires. Every yr, lightning causes tens of thousands of wildfires beyond Africa, Asia, and Europe. In the past, some of these would take burned the remains of hominin camps, including bones, stone tools, and sediments. In such cases, the fire residues accept nothing to do with hominin occupation of the sites.

During the last stage, humans learned how to brand fire, but again, we are not however certain when this happened. Starting about 400,000 years ago, we begin finding much improve evidence for human being-controlled burn down, such every bit intact campfires, or "hearths," that incorporate concentrations of charcoal and ash inside caves, where natural fires don't burn down. Furthermore, the number of sites with such evidence increases dramatically. So it is articulate that by this fourth dimension, some hominins in some regions could manage fire and thereby control it, but whether they could get in remains an open up question.

Between 2000 and 2010, our enquiry squad—made up of 3 Paleolithic archaeologists who focus on stone tool technology and two geoarchaeologists who written report how archaeological sites form—excavated two Middle Paleolithic sites, Pech de l'Azé Four and Roc de Marsal, in the Périgord region of southwestern France. Pech IV and Roc de Marsal are caves that were regularly used every bit campsites past small groups of Neanderthals from 100,000 to xl,000 years agone, which is about when Homo sapiens, mod humans, arrived in Europe.

Neanderthal fire - Experiments show that fires leave behind evidence—charcoal, ash, and burned artifacts—that gets buried under layers of sediment that accumulate over time, leaving a record that can persist for many thousands of years. — Experiments testify that fires leave behind evidence—charcoal, ash, and burned artifacts—that gets buried under layers of sediment. These layers accumulate over fourth dimension, leaving a record that can persist for many thousands of years. Vera Aldeias

One of the more interesting discoveries nosotros made during our years of excavating Pech IV was strikingly abundant evidence of fire use. In the lowermost deposits, those resting directly on the cave'southward boulder floor, we constitute a 40-centimeter-thick layer total of charcoal, ash, and burned artifacts mark where individual campfires had been built 100,000 years ago. There were also thousands of stone tools, many of which had been incidentally burned by nearby fires. (Paleolithic people were producing, using, and discarding stone tools on a daily basis, so their occupation sites are full of these artifacts—along with bone fragments from their prey animals—which were somewhen cached nether sediments that accumulated over fourth dimension. Later people who used the sites could not help but build their fires on meridian of concentrations of discarded tools and bones.)

Westwarde constitute similar evidence at Roc de Marsal, which too has a thick sequence of successive layers containing tens of thousands of stone tools and the basic of butchered animals. Just as at Pech 4, the oldest layers at Roc de Marsal independent abundant evidence of fire, including dozens of intact hearths and then well-preserved that they looked like they could take been abandoned but days before.

Weastward were non surprised to discover signs of burn at these ii sites, since other, even older sites likewise offered good testify of fire. And given the prevailing notion of a spark—that once burn down-making was "discovered" it speedily became part of everyday life—we just assumed that the Neanderthals at Pech IV and Roc de Marsal knew how to make burn down.

However, other evidence from these sites presently led u.s. to question that notion. For one, neither site showed signs of burn down in its upper layers. At first, we speculated that since Paleolithic people tended to live right at the mouths of caves, wind or water had removed the fires' ephemeral traces, like charcoal and ash. At the same time, notwithstanding, almost none of the thousands of stone tools and animal bones we found in these upper layers were burned. If burn down had been present, these objects would have been altered by the heat. Erosional processes like current of air and water, after all, cannot selectively remove burned objects and leave behind unburned ones. It was articulate, then, that fire had almost never been used at these sites in the later periods.

Neanderthal fire - Research conducted at Roc de Marsal revealed that the oldest layers of occupation contained abundant evidence of fire. — Enquiry our squad conducted at Roc de Marsal revealed that the oldest layers of occupation contained abundant prove of fire. Shannon McPherron

This seemed strange, particularly because the older layers dated to a warm climatic period, while the more recent layers—the ones without fire—were deposited betwixt 70,000 and 40,000 years ago, a fourth dimension of increasing cold as glaciers again spread across much of Europe. This raised some really interesting questions: Why did Neanderthals stop using burn down during cold periods, when the need for warmth would be most of import? And if they were using fire only in the warm periods, what were they using it for? Cooking would be one possibility, but and then why did they not melt their food during the colder periods?

Having fires in warm periods and non in cold periods made little sense. It'due south not simply a question of having fuel bachelor. While copse are much more mutual during warmer periods, animal bone, which is likewise an effective fuel (and was used for the fires at Pech Four), is abundant during both warm and cold periods. This leaves one possible explanation: The Neanderthals at this time were still in the second stage of interacting with burn—they were collecting naturally occurring fire when information technology was available but did not nevertheless take the technology to start fires themselves.

It is well-known today that natural fires from lightning strikes occur much more than frequently in warm conditions—whether in more than temperate places or during warmer parts of the year. Similarly, lightning would have been much more than prevalent during the warmer phases of the Pleistocene Epoch (which lasted from roughly 2.6 million years ago to around 10,000 years agone) than during the colder periods. If the Neanderthals lacked the ability to outset burn themselves and could thus only obtain it from natural fires, then we would expect to find much more evidence of hearths during warmer periods and less during colder ones. Which is why it is likely that Neanderthals had not yet entered the third stage of interacting with fire. That technological development occurred either elsewhere or at a later time.

Neanderthal fire - Evidence at both Pech IV and Roc de Marsal suggests that Neanderthals did not have fire during the coldest time periods. — Evidence from both Pech 4 and Roc de Marsal suggests that Neanderthals did not have fire during the coldest time periods. Shannon McPherron

The show from Pech Iv and Roc de Marsal clearly shows that the Neanderthals at these sites lived without fire non just for long periods merely also during the coldest periods. This alone raises fifty-fifty more questions about how they were able to survive. In that location is no clear evidence that they could make clothing (although some researchers today seem to remember Neanderthals were probable making some articles of article of clothing, fifty-fifty if they were very crude), so peradventure an old theory virtually Neanderthals—that they were really hairy—is correct. (This notion, from the early on 1900s, was discarded in later decades considering information technology was seen as dehumanizing Neanderthals.) It might also mean that they relied more on food—especially meat—that did not need to be cooked.

So while nosotros are obligate fire users today—we could not survive without fire in some course—Neanderthals, according to our research, had no such dependence. Mayhap burn dependency arose later, in the Upper Paleolithic (twoscore,000 to ten,000 years ago), and it is almost certain to accept existed by the fourth dimension agronomics developed at the commencement of the Neolithic flow (roughly ten,000 years ago in the Middle East). Simply there is still much we do not know.

If chimpanzees can finer interact with wildfires, can we assume that the same was true for some of the earliest hominins, such as Australopithecus afarensis? When did our hominin ancestors starting time start to collect burning material and carry it dorsum to their campsites, as portrayed in Quest for Fire and equally probably practiced by Neanderthals? And, of course, when did humans beginning larn how to make burn? These are merely a few of the mysteries that remain unsolved.

The power to accept advantage of the properties of burn down is ane of the near important technological advances in our evolutionary by. What we are realizing now, still, is that it was non the issue of a single accident or stroke of genius. Information technology was, instead, a process that probable unfolded over hundreds of thousands of years. And for the Neanderthals, the process was punctuated by periods of intense cold in which, when the benefits of fire would take been greatest, they simply had to make practise without it.

Toward the cease of Quest for Burn, a young Human sapiens woman teaches a small group of Neanderthals how to start a burn by using the paw-drill technique to create an ember. While information technology is certainly possible that modernistic humans developed burn-making technology before arriving in Europe, and peradventure even shared it with Neanderthals, such a scenario remains, at this betoken, pure speculation.

Westhat has become articulate, however, is that before Human sapiens arrived in Europe, our Paleolithic cousins didn't just spend a few months or years in a common cold land without burn down—they spent entire lifetimes, many generations even, without the warm glow of a hearth to take the arctic off their toes, melt their meat, and lift their spirits.

This article was republished on The Atlantic.