A stunning discovery at an archaeological dig in the UK is rewriting the timeline of when humans first made fire.
Researchers have discovered the earliest known instance of human-created fire, which took place in the east of England 400,000 years ago.
The new discovery, in the village of Barnham, pushes the origin of human fire-making back by more than 350,000 years, far earlier than previously thought.
The ability to create fire was the moment that changed everything for humans. It provided warmth at will and enabled our ancestors to cook and eat meat, which made our brains grow. It meant we were no longer a group of animals struggling to survive – it gave us time to think and invent and become the advanced species we are today.
The team say they found baked earth together with the earliest Stone Age lighter – consisting of a flint that was bashed against a rock called pyrite, also known as fool’s gold, to create a spark.
BBC News has been given world exclusive access to the prehistoric site.
Under the treetops of Barnham Forest lies an archaeological treasure, buried a few metres beneath the Earth, that dates back to the furthest depths of human pre-history.
Around the edges of a clearing, tangled green branches frame the scene like a curtain, as if the forest itself were slowly revealing a long-buried chapter of its past. Prof Nick Ashton of the British Museum leads me through the trees and we both step into his astonishing story.
We walk down onto a dirt floor carved into deep, stepped hollows of raw earth and pale sand. This was an ancient fireplace at the heart of a prehistoric “town hall”, around which early Stone Age people came together hundreds of thousands of years ago. “You can imagine early humans gathering around the central hearth and beginning the development of early language,” he tells me. Overwhelmed by the enormity of what could have been a key moment in human evolution at this very spot, I whispered to myself as much as to Prof Ashton, “This is an incredible place… incredible”.
“Yeah,” Prof Ashton mutters. I look toward him and see that it’s his turn now to become glassy eyed and lose himself in his thoughts, reliving his first realisation of the magnitude of the archaeological importance of the find, “Quite remarkable… very special”.
The Palaeolithic site of East Farm Barnham lies within a disused clay pit tucked away in a wooded area of Suffolk. Earlier excavations revealed that early humans visited the site, leaving behind numerous stone artefacts. Prof Ashton shows me one of them: “You can also see where bits, small bits of flint, have popped off due to the heat”. His time team has been excavating deposits from a warm period at the end of Britain’s most severe last ice age buried in a patch of clay, which sits in a channel cut into the chalk bedrock by a glacier hundreds of thousands of years ago. Prof Ashton’s fellow archaeologist, Dr Rob Davis, also from the British Museum, joins us at the site and shows me the discovery that sealed the deal: fragments of a mineral here that changed the world forever: iron pyrite, also known as fool’s gold. But it literally and figuratively sparked a new golden age of human enlightenment. (BBC)
Dr Davis shows me how sparks are created when the pyrite is hit with a flint axe, enough to create a fire when it lands on dry tinder. It was the first known lighter. Simple technology, but utterly transformative for the future course of humanity.