Photo: Craig Williams/The Trustees of the British Museum
Researchers have announced what they describe as the oldest known evidence of deliberate fire-making, discovered at a 400,000-year-old archaeological site in present-day England. The findings, published by a team working at the Barnham site, include tiny fragments of pyrite — a mineral that sparks when struck against flint — suggesting that early humans were actively producing fire rather than relying solely on natural wildfires, Live Science reported.
Rob Davis, a paleoarchaeologist at the British Museum and co-author of the study, said the ability to make fire was crucial for human evolution, enabling advances ranging from increased brain size to the formation of larger social groups and the development of language. Davis and his colleagues have been excavating Barnham since 2013, uncovering stone tools, heat-altered sediments, and ancient charcoal dated to around 400,000 years ago.
Recent work has now revealed what the team argues are the earliest definitive traces of controlled fire use — most likely by Neanderthals. Early 20th-century excavations had already identified the site as Paleolithic, but new dating places human presence there as far back as 415,000 years ago, when the area was a shallow seasonal pool surrounded by lowland.
In one sector of the site, archaeologists found heat-fractured stone axes and reddened clay that appeared to have been repeatedly fired, pointing to a possible hearth. The key breakthrough, according to British Museum curator Nick Ashton, was the discovery of pyrite fragments. Because pyrite is extremely rare in the local geology, its presence suggests that someone intentionally brought it to the site, likely to generate sparks for fire-making.
Controlled fire use is regarded as a decisive milestone in human evolution. While evidence of natural fire use is much older — including burnt sediments in Kenya dating to 1.5 million years ago and charred remains at 800,000-year-old sites in Israel — proof of intentional fire production has remained scarce and often ambiguous.
Around 400,000 years ago, traces of fire become more common across Europe, Africa, and the Levant, with archaeological sites in France, Portugal, Spain, Ukraine, and the UK showing signs of hearths. However, the authors of the new study argue that none of the earlier examples provides geochemical evidence as strong as that found at Barnham.
The discovery, they say, marks a major step in understanding when — and how — early humans first mastered one of the most transformative technologies in human history.
