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SUNDAY SCIENCE: ARCHAEOLOGISTS FIND OLDEST EVIDENCE OF FIRE-MAKING  
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Carl Zimmer
December 10, 2025
The New York Times
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_ Neanderthals 400,000 years ago were striking flints to make fires,
researchers have found. _

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Some 400,000 years ago, in what is now eastern England, a group of
Neanderthals used flint and pyrite to make fires by a watering hole
— not just once, but time after time, over several generations.

That is the conclusion of a study published
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the journal Nature. Previously, the oldest known evidence of humans
making fires dated back just 50,000 years. The new finding indicates
that this critical step in human history occurred much earlier.

“A lot of people had a hunch that they were making fire at this
date,” said Nick Ashton, an archaeologist at the British Museum and
an author of the study. “But now we can convincingly say, ‘Yeah,
this was the case.’”

From Charles Darwin on, biologists have looked upon the mastery of
fire as a hallmark in the evolution of our species. Early humans may
have first used fire to cook their food. That advance let them improve
their diet, by removing toxins from food and making it easier to
absorb nutrients from their meals. Fires may have also kept them warm
at night and kept predators at bay.

 

 

Later, they found new uses for fire. They cooked tree bark to create
glue, which they used to anchor stone spear tips to wooden shafts. And
starting about 10,000 years ago, humans began making fires to smelt
copper and other metals, ushering in civilization.

As important as fire has been to our species, tracing its early
history has proved an immense challenge. Rain can wash away ash and
charcoal, erasing the evidence of a fire. Even when scientists do
uncover the rare trace of an ancient blaze, it can be hard to
determine whether it was created by people or ignited by lightning.

The oldest evidence for human ancestors using fire, dating back to
between 1 million and 1.5 million years ago, comes from a cave in
South Africa. Human ancestors left behind tens of thousands of
fragments of bones from the animals they butchered to eat. Of those
fragments, 270 show signs of having been burned in a fire.

But clues like these don’t offer clear proof that those ancient
people knew how to make a fire. They may have just stumbled across a
wildfire from time to time, and figured out ways to take advantage of
it. They might have learned to light a stick from the fire, and then
carry the ember back to their cave to cook a meal.

But that approach had its limits, Dr. Ashton noted. “You’re
dependent on local lightning strikes,” he said. “It’s very
unpredictable, and you can’t rely on it.”

A heat-shattered handaxe found adjacent to the 400,000-year-old
campfire site; a first fragment of iron pyrite found there in
2017.Credit...Jordan Mansfield/Pathways to Ancient Britain Project

A crucial step took place when early humans figured out how to make
fires on demand, either by using rocks to create sparks or rubbing a
piece of wood until the friction started a flame. “Once you can make
fire, all those problems evaporate,” Dr. Ashton said.

Dr. Ashton and his colleagues caught their first glimpse of ancient
fires in 2013, as they were digging at an archaeological site called
Barnham in eastern England. For decades, researchers had found ancient
tools and other signs of early humans there. In 2013, Dr. Ashton and
his colleagues found something new: pieces of oddly broken flint.

Only an intense heat could have shattered the hard rocks. But Dr.
Ashton and his colleagues couldn’t determine if the fire that broke
the Barnham flints had been created by humans or lightning.

For years afterward, the researchers returned to Barnham hoping to
tackle that question, without any further success. Finally, on a
summer day in 2021, Dr. Ashton had a thought. As he prepared to take a
nap under an oak tree, he recalled how, a couple of years earlier, he
had glimpsed an intriguing streak of red clay. The nap could wait.

“I thought, I’ll have a little poke around,” Dr. Ashton said.

He found the red streak, and quickly realized that it was a
two-foot-wide band of burned ancient soil. Had humans burned it, or
had lighting? Dr. Ashton and his colleagues put the two possibilities
to a test.

Over the next four years, they analyzed the chemistry of the sediment,
while conducting further digs around it. Eventually they determined
that, about 400,000 years ago, the site had been a watering hole,
which Neanderthals probably visited in search of game.

A wildfire would have left evidence far from the site, but the
researchers found none. What’s more, the same patch had been burned
repeatedly over the course of decades. And the fires there reached
intense temperatures and burned for hours. The researchers grew
increasingly certain that generations of Neanderthals had
intentionally set fires at Barnham.

A last major clue came to light with the discovery of pieces of pyrite
alongside heat-shattered flints. Anthropologists have documented many
groups of hunter-gatherers around the world who make fires by striking
pyrite against flint.

All the more notable, Dr. Ashton said, was that the rocks for miles
around Barnham don’t contain pyrite. He speculated that the
fire-making Neanderthals must have brought pieces of it to Barnham.
The nearest known source of the mineral is some 40 miles to the east.

The pyrite was “the icing on the cake,” said Ségolène
Vandevelde, an archaeologist at the University of Quebec in Chicoutimi
who was not involved in the new study. “Altogether, it’s a really
convincing case.”

 

Excavation of 400,000-year-old pond sediments at Barnham, England; an
ancient campfire site, with reddened sediment indicating heated clay.
Credit...Jordan Mansfield/Pathways to Ancient Britain Project

But a question remains: How widespread was fire-making 400,000 years
ago?

Perhaps not very, said Michael Chazan, an anthropologist at the
University of Toronto who was not involved in the research. Other
Neanderthals across Europe and the Near East might still have been
collecting their embers from natural fires. Only at a place like
Barnham did they have the right opportunity to learn how to make
fires.

“This experiment seems to be local in scope,” Dr. Chazan said.
“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 is more optimistic. He speculated that fire-making might
have become widespread hundreds of thousands of years ago, not just
among Neanderthals, but also among Denisovans in Asia
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and modern humans in Africa
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Anyone encountering people who had mastered fire would have wanted to
copy them.

“Once something suddenly takes off, I think it will spread very
quickly,” Dr. Ashton said.

For the time being, Barnham remains the only place known for any
evidence of fire-making hundreds of thousands of years ago. But that
isn’t proof that the practice was rare at the time, Dr. Ashton said.
After all, it had taken years of field work at Barnham to uncover the
telling evidence. Similar efforts could reveal other Barnhams
elsewhere in the world.

“One lesson that archaeology has taught me is that the more effort
you put in, the more reward you get,” Dr. Ashton said.

_CARL ZIMMER writes the “Origins” column and is the author several
books about DNA, including “She Has Her Mother’s Laugh” and
“Life’s Edge.”_

_Subscribe to the NEW YORK TIMES._
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* Neanderthals
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