Humans may have discovered fire hundreds of thousands of years before previously thought: new research

This study is lit.

Scientists have discovered charred animal remains in South Africa that are up to 1.8 million years old, potentially pushing back the timeline of human fire use by hundreds of thousands of years, per a hot new study in the journal PLOS One.

The researchers happened upon the revelatory find during an investigation of South Africa’s Wonderwerk Cave, a repository that has harbored a treasure trove of prehistoric artifacts from stone tools to rock art.

While exploring an older layer of the cavern, Stratum 11, scientists found burned bones of mammals that dated back to between 1.07 and 1.79 million years ago.

This possibly marks the oldest evidence of human pyrotechnical use, surpassing the previous record set by a 1-million-year-old bone and heat-altered tools and sediment, which were also found at Wonderwerk.

Learning how to harness fire represented a pivotal point in human evolution as it sparked a “momentous shift in the relations between hominins and their natural and cultural environments,” per the study.

By taming the blaze, humans could keep warm, extend daylight hours, deter predators and scavengers, and consume a wider range of meat and plant foods through cooking.

The development also coincided with the enlargement of the brain and was credited with fueling the development of human societies.

The team confirmed the bones had been put to flame via a method called bone luminescence, in which they shone high-energy blue light on the fossils while under a microscope, causing the cooked remains to glow red when viewed through a specific filter.

The team also noted that the flambed fossils were discovered 100 feet from the cave’s entrance, ruling out the possibility that the animals were victims of a wildfire.

To pinpoint the times those blazes occurred, scientists dated the cave sediment via magnetostratigraphy — using the rock’s magnetic properties to pinpoint age — and cosmogenic burial dating, which determines how long a rock or sediment has been shielded from cosmic rays.

By deploying these flame forensic techniques, the scientists were able to extend “the chronology of one of the world’s earliest paleo-fire records,” commented the study authors in their paper.

However, they noted that said burned bones only pointed to repeated fire use in the cavern rather than routine cooking or breakthroughs in pyrotechnic technology.

Ultimately, the findings offer “the potential to refine our understanding of the emergence of hominin pyrotechnology, its behavioral significance, and its ecological underpinnings during the early Acheulean (the period from 1.76 million years ago (mya) to about 130,000 years ago),” the researchers concluded.