OUR early ancestors used fire to keep warm, scare away predators and cook food as long as 790,000 years ago. So claim archaeologists who have unearthed scorched wood and flint fragments at a hominid settlement on the banks of the river Jordan in Israel.
The evidence, is compelling, not conclusive. But it is more convincing than supposed vestiges of fire use in Africa that suggest our forbears began making fires 1.6 million years ago.
The precise moment our ancestors discovered fire occupies an iconic place in the popular imagination. And as chimpanzees, our closest living relatives, continue to show impressive use of language and tools, the idea of fire-control as a uniquely human ability has grown in importance. 鈥淚t is the most human skill that we have,鈥� says Nira Alperson, an archaeologist at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
Advertisement
But finding direct evidence for ancient fire use is extremely difficult. 鈥淎ny small fact you find is a great triumph,鈥� says Derek Roe, an archaeologist at the University of Oxford. The earliest date yet proposed is based on patches of discoloured sediment found at Koobi Fora in Kenya. Some say these patches were produced by intentionally set fires, but many archaeologists are not convinced.
Now Alperson and a team of archaeologists have analysed nearly 36,000 pieces of flint and more than 50,000 pieces of wood from what was once probably a Homo erectus settlement at Gesher Benot Ya鈥檃qov. Many of the burnt specimens were clustered in two patches, which the team believe were ancient hearths (Science, vol 304, p 725). Also, only 4 per cent of the wood and 2 per cent of the flint was charred, a much smaller proportion than would be made by a natural fire, says the team.
That assumption may not be correct, says Sally McBreaty, an anthropologist at the University of Connecticut in Storrs. But it could be checked by starting an experimental wildfire and measuring what proportion of wood and flint in the undergrowth ended up burnt.
Everyone agrees that learning to use fire would have been a tremendous boon to our ancestors, allowing them to spread to colder regions, drive away predators, get more energy from food by cooking it, and enjoy a more cohesive social life.
Richard Wrangham, an expert on primate behaviour at Harvard University, has argued that fire and cooking had such a massive impact on ancient humans that it probably coincided with the origin of Homo erectus in Africa, around 1.8 million years ago (New Scientist, 22 March 2003, p 17).
Any further study of the Gesher Benot Ya鈥檃qov site may prove impossible. Since the pieces of flint and wood were removed in 1999, a large portion of the site has been destroyed by dredgers engineering the Jordan river. 鈥淭here was a huge outcry,鈥� says Roe, but it was too late. 鈥淚t was already done.鈥�