Fire control: the flame that changed humankind

A winter night, a pot on the hearth and a family seated around it. The scene is so common that we seldom think how deep its roots go. Lighting a fire, tending it and cooking on it is among the oldest skills of man. It changed not only his food but also his way of living.

Fires started by lightning in forests have always existed. But keeping a fire in one place at will, keeping it alight and putting it to use is quite a different matter. When did humans learn this? The oldest known evidence so far has come from a cave in South Africa.

The ash of Wonderwerk Cave

Wonderwerk Cave is located in South Africa’s Northern Cape province, about 60 kilometres south of the town of Kuruman. Its layers hold a record of human presence spread over nearly two million years.

In 2012, Francesco Berna and colleagues published a microscopic and chemical analysis of the cave’s sediments in the American journal PNAS. In one layer they found burned bones and plant ash. This showed that the fire had burned inside the cave and had not washed in from outside. The layer dates to the early Acheulean period and is about one million years old. According to the researchers, it was then the oldest secure evidence of burning at an archaeological site.

In June 2026, a new study of the same cave was published in the journal PLoS One. M. Dolores Marín-Monfort and her team tried a new way of identifying burned bones, using a particular property of bone luminescence, and checked it against another method. According to them, traces of fire are present not only in the one-million-year-old layer but also in the layer below it, which dates to between 1.79 million and 1.07 million years ago. The intensity of burning was not uniform everywhere. From this the team concluded that fire was repeatedly brought into the cave. The study is recent and other experts have yet to give their views.

The hearths of Gesher Benot Ya’aqov

Having fire is one thing. Lighting a hearth in the same place again and again is another. In 2004, Naama Goren-Inbar and her team announced in the journal Science the discovery of burned seeds, wood and flint, about 790,000 years old, at Gesher Benot Ya'aqov in Israel.

Small pieces of burned flint were not scattered but clustered in specific spots, which were possibly the sites of hearths. Wood from six types of plants had been burned there. At least three of them, olive, wild barley and wild grape, are edible. According to the Human Origins Program of the Smithsonian Institution in the United States, the oldest known hearths are at least 790,000 years old.

Everyday fire

Over time, fire ceased to be an occasional thing. According to a 2007 study of Qesem Cave, also in Israel, fire was used habitually there at the end of the Lower Palaeolithic. The cave’s layers yielded large quantities of wood ash and burned bones. Cut marks on the bones suggest that the meat of hunted animals was butchered near the fire.

Another big question is when humans learnt to make fire themselves. Early humans may have carried a flame from natural fires and kept it burning. In 2018, A. C. Sorensen and colleagues reported in Scientific Reports on stone tools about 50,000 years old from several sites in France. The tools bore marks of the kind made by repeatedly rubbing or striking the mineral pyrite, as is done to produce a spark and light a fire. According to the researchers, this is the first direct evidence of Neanderthals regularly making fire, although the subject is still debated.

Cooked food, bigger brain

According to the Smithsonian, fire gave humans a new tool, and its most important use was cooking. Cooking makes the nutrients in food easier to obtain and food easier to digest, and it removes the poison in some plants. The institution says some researchers believe the tradition of cooking may be more than 1.5 million years old, but this remains a hypothesis.

Fire also changed social life. According to the Smithsonian, humans began gathering around hearths and shelters to eat and sit together. As the brain grew larger and more complex, childhood grew longer. This required more care from parents and a safe, home-like setting.

Today’s bonfire

Today we strike a match or press a gas button, but the task is the same as that carried out in Wonderwerk Cave millions of years ago: keeping fire under control and drawing light, warmth and cooked food from it. Many later inventions, such as fired clay pots, bricks and metalworking, would also not have been possible without controlled fire.