Archaeologists working in Eastern England have uncovered evidence that radically shifts the timeline of when humans first learned to intentionally produce fire. A newly published study argues that Neanderthals living roughly 400,000 years ago repeatedly ignited flames beside a watering hole using flint and pyrite, suggesting not just a single event, but a long-term, generational practice.
The findings, appearing Wednesday in Nature, push back the oldest known proof of deliberate fire-making by hundreds of thousands of years; until now, the record hovered around 50,000 years ago. The new discovery suggests that the controlled use of fire emerged far earlier and played a more foundational role in human evolution than previously understood.
Fire has long loomed as a pivotal milestone in theories about human origins. Since the days of Charles Darwin, scholars have argued that controlling fire shaped everything from diet to safety to social structure. Early humans likely used flames to cook, which removed toxins from plants, softened food, and vastly improved nutrient absorption. Fire also offered heat on cold nights and protection from predators.
“By having fire, it provides this kind of intense socialization time after dusk,” Rob Davis, an archaeologist at The British Museum and co-author of the study, told NPR. “And that’s going to be a really important thing for other developments like the development of language, development of storytelling, early belief systems. And these could have played a critical part in maintaining social relationships over bigger distances or within more complex social groups.”
Later, it allowed people to cook tree bark into adhesives sturdy enough to fasten stone spear tips to wooden shafts. And by around 10,000 years ago, fire became the engine behind early metallurgy, enabling copper and other ores to be smelted, setting civilization itself into motion.
Yet despite fire’s mythic status in our species’ story, its earliest history has remained exasperatingly difficult to trace. Ash and charcoal wash away in storms. Burned soil erodes or mixes with sediment. Even when archaeologists find ancient burn marks, determining whether they were caused by lightning or by human hands can be tricky.
Evidence of fire use extends deep into the past in a South African cave, dating back between 1 million and 1.5 million years. Researchers found tens of thousands of animal bones discarded by human ancestors. On 270 fragments, burn marks show they were exposed to heat.
But such cases only prove proximity to fire, not mastery of making it. For these earlier populations, the flames could easily have come from wildfires. They might have grabbed a burning branch, carried it back, and kept embers alive long enough to cook or warm themselves—powerful, yes, but dependent on luck.
This limitation, researchers say, would have placed real constraints on survival. Needing unpredictable lightning strikes to spark your dinner is not exactly reliable. As Dr. Nick Ashton of the British Museum explained,
For archaeologists, the real holy grail has been evidence not of fire use, but of fire production. Creating flame on demand, whether by generating sparks from stone or by friction between wooden sticks, would have revolutionized early life. Once a group understood how to start a fire whenever needed, the uncertainties evaporated.
“We know that around this time period, brain size was increasing towards its present levels,” Chris Stringer, the research leader on human evolution at the Natural History Museum in London and another author of the Nature study, told NBC News.
“Our brains are energetically expensive. They use about 20% of our body energy. So having the use of fire, having the ability to make fire, is going to help release nutrition from the food, which will help to fuel that brain, help to run it. And indeed, you know, allow the evolution of a bigger brain.”
At the site of Barnham in eastern England, researchers had been investigating traces of early humans for decades, studying handaxes, flint tools, and butchered bones. But in 2013, Dr. Ashton and colleagues found flint pieces fractured in ways that suggested exposure to extremely high heat. Something had burned there. But what caused it?
They returned year after year, excavating trenches and gathering soil samples, but the smoking gun eluded them. The heat-shattered flints couldn’t, by themselves, reveal whether Neanderthals had built controlled fires or whether a natural blaze had swept across the landscape.
Then came a moment of almost comic serendipity. On a warm day in 2021, Dr. Ashton settled beneath an oak tree, intending to take a quick nap. Instead, he remembered a brief glimpse of red clay he’d noticed years before. He got up. “I thought, I’ll have a little poke around,” he recalled.
Beneath the surface, Ashton discovered a two-foot-wide band of reddened, scorched soil, ancient clay baked by intense heat. Over the next four years, he and his team analyzed sediment chemistry, mapped burn layers, and excavated the surrounding area to understand the context.
They determined that 400,000 years ago, the spot was a watering hole, a place where Neanderthals likely hunted or gathered animals lured by fresh water. If a wildfire had swept through, it would have burned a wide region, not a concentrated patch. But here, only one specific zone showed repeat burning. And the fires weren’t quick flashes; they burned hot and long, some for hours. They returned again and again.
This suggested purpose, not chance. At this point in the investigation, Dr. Ashton reflected on the growing clarity of the evidence. “For me, personally, it’s the most exciting discovery of my 40-year career,” Ashton said.
“A lot of people had a hunch that they were making fire at this date. But now we can convincingly say, ‘Yeah, this was the case.'”
The final breakthrough arrived with a surprising discovery: alongside the heat-shattered flints, researchers found fragments of pyrite. Around the world, anthropologists have recorded hunter-gatherer groups creating sparks by striking pyrite against flint. But pyrite doesn’t occur naturally near Barnham. The closest known source lies roughly 40 miles to the east. Someone brought those rocks there deliberately.
To the researchers, this was strong evidence that Neanderthals not only used fire but actively transported the necessary materials to create it. Dennis Sandgathe, an archaeologist at Simon Fraser University, who was not involved in the new study, told NPR that because of this, it was unlikely to be an improvisation. It was a practiced behavior.
“As far as we know, we don’t know of any other uses for pyrite other than to make sparks with flint to start fires. And of all the dozens and dozens of sites across Eurasia and into Africa that we’ve excavated that have fire residues in them, nobody’s discovered a piece of pyrite before.”
Archaeologist Ségolène Vandevelde put it this way: The pyrite discovery was “the icing on the cake.” She added, “Altogether, it’s a really convincing case.”
Despite the strength of the Barnham findings, some experts caution against assuming that fire-making was common across early human populations.
Michael Chazan, an anthropologist at the University of Toronto, believes the practice may have been highly localized. While one group of Neanderthals might have mastered striking pyrite and flint, others across Europe or the Near East may still have relied on gathering embers from natural blazes simply because they lacked the right materials or the right teachers.
“This experiment seems to be local in scope. It still stands to reason that many Neanderthal groups did not have access to materials that could be used to strike a light.”
Dr. Ashton, however, takes a different view. He speculates that once any group achieved reliable fire-making, the knowledge could have spread widely. The ability to create fire would have been immensely attractive and worth copying across populations, whether Neanderthal, Denisovan, or early Homo sapiens. “Once something suddenly takes off, I think it will spread very quickly,” he said.
Sandgathe says, “We now realize that was way too simplistic.”
“The question is, are they collecting it from natural sources or just carrying around and curating it? Or are they making it up? On the surface, this is a very compelling case that groups knew how to make fire.”
In his opinion, it’s more likely that different groups of humans discovered how to make fire at various times.
“It’s just not a linear story. It’s a complex story of many fits and starts, over here and over there — and many millennia where nobody knew how to make fire until it was discovered again.”
For now, Barnham stands alone as the earliest confirmed site of controlled fire-making. But archaeologists stress that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Barnham itself required years of targeted digging, happenstance memory, and favorable preservation to reveal its secrets.
Dr. Ashton believes many similar sites may simply be waiting for the right shovel.
“One lesson that archaeology has taught me is that the more effort you put in, the more reward you get,” he said.
If fire-making was indeed widespread hundreds of thousands of years ago, the proof may still lie buried around the world.
Moumita Basuroychowdhury is a Contributing Reporter at The National Digest. After earning an economics degree at Cornell University, she moved to NYC to pursue her MFA in creative writing. She enjoys reporting on science, business and culture news. You can reach her at moumita.b@thenationaldigest.com.
