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An artist’s impression of making sparks from pyrite and flint. | Credit: Craig Williams/The Trustees of the British Museum
Neanderthals they were the world’s first innovators in fire technology, the small evidence from England suggests. Flakes of pyrite found at a more than 400,000-year-old archaeological site in Suffolk, eastern England, challenge archaeologists’ evidence for the controlled production of fire and suggest that key developments in the human brain began much earlier than previously thought.
“We are a species that used fire to really shape the world around us,” co-author of the study Rob Davisa paleolithic archaeologist from the British Museum said at a press conference on Tuesday (9 December). “The ability to make fire would have been extremely important” in human evolutionsaid Davis, “accelerating evolutionary trends,” such as developing larger brains, maintaining larger social groups, and increasing language skills.
Since 2013, Davis and colleagues have excavated an archaeological site in England called Barnhamwhich produced stone tools, burnt sediments and charcoal from 400,000 years ago. In a study published Wednesday (December 10) in the journal Natureresearchers revealed that the site contained the world’s earliest direct evidence of fire making – and that this fire technology was probably pioneered by Neanderthals.
A big turning point
Barnham was first recognized as a Paleolithic human site in the early 1900s due to the presence of stone tools. But recent excavations have uncovered evidence of ancient human groups occupying the area more than 415,000 years ago, when Barnham was a small seasonal water hole in a forest depression.
In one corner of the site, archaeologists found a concentration of heat-broken hand axes, as well as an area of reddened clay. Through a series of scientific analyses, the researchers discovered that the reddened clay had been subjected to repeated, localized burning, suggesting that the area may have been an ancient hearth.
“The big turning point came with the discovery of iron pyrite,” study co-author Nick Ashtoncurator of paleolithic collections at the British Museum, said at the press conference.
Pyrite, also known as fool’s gold, is a naturally occurring mineral that can produce sparks when hit by flint. While pyrite is found in many locations around the world, it is extremely rare in the Barnham area, meaning someone specifically brought the pyrite to the site, probably for the purpose of making fire, the researchers said in the study.
Discovery of first iron pyrite fragment in 2017 at Barnham, Suffolk, UK | Credit: Jordan Mansfield/Pathways to Ancient Britain Project
The use of fire by humans
Because of the importance of controlled fire, paleoanthropologists have long debated the timing of this invention.
“There are so many obvious advantages of fire, from cooking to protection from predators to its technological use in creating new types of artifacts to its ability to bring people together.” April Nowella paleolithic archaeologist at the University of Victoria in Canada who was not involved in the study told Live Science in an email. “We only have to think of our own childhoods gathering around a campfire to understand its emotional resonance.”
Researchers believe that early humans first used forest fires to cook food. This was a crucial step in human evolution because cooking widened the range of available foods and made them more digestible, which in turn provided more nutrients. needed to grow a bigger brainDavis said.
But there is limited evidence for early deliberate fire technology, and that evidence is often ambiguous, the study’s researchers noted.
For example, scientists dug up reddened sediment at Copy Fora from Kenya dating back to about 1.5 million years ago. The researchers suggested that it could hint at the early use of fire because the key hominin at the site – The man stood up — he had quite a big brain. And at two Sites in Israel, dated to about 800,000 years ago, burnt animal bones and stone tools suggest possible control of fire by the human ancestors who lived there.
Fire technology exploded then about 400,000 years ago. Archaeologists have found evidence of burning in cave sites in France, Portugal, Spain, Ukraine and Britain, and then the more widespread use of fire in Europe, Africa and the Levant (the region around the eastern Mediterranean) 200,000 years ago.
But these earlier examples do not show the same kind of conclusive geochemical evidence of fire production that was found at Barnham, Ashton argued. He called the team’s careful analysis of the Barnham sediment and identification of pyrite “the most exciting discovery of my 40-year career.”
Researchers are excavating the Barnham site in the UK | Credit: Jordan Mansfield/Pathways to Ancient Britain Project
Neanderthals are ‘fully human’
However, any bones at Barnham have since disintegrated, so the “smoking gun” of butchered and burned animal bones that could prove the site was used for cooking has not been found.
This also means that there are no remains of the fire makers themselves at Barnham – but co-author of the study Chris Stringera paleoanthropologist at the National History Museum in London, has a guess about their identity.
“We hypothesize that the Barnham fires were made by early Neanderthals,” Stringer said at the news conference, based on a nearby site called Swanscombewhere Neanderthal skull bones dating from the same time period as Barnham were discovered.
While experts have known for about a decade that some Neanderthals could start fire, that evidence is only in the past 50,000 years. Barnham’s findings pushed the date back 350,000 years, suggesting Neanderthals were much smarter than most people give them credit for.
Neanderthals “are fully human,” Stringer said. “They have complex behavior, they adapt to new environments, and their brains are as big as ours. They are highly evolved people.”
Nowell said the study’s results add fuel to a larger debate about Neanderthals’ control of fire and their social and cultural use of it.
“There’s a lot of discussion right now about whether all Neanderthals made fire or whether only some Neanderthals made fire at certain times and places,” Nowell said. The new study “is another important data point in our understanding of Neanderthal pyrotechnic capabilities, with all that cognitive, social and technological implications.”
Who made the first fire?
If the researchers are correct that Neanderthals were making fire from flint and pyrite more than 400,000 years ago in England, that raises further questions, Nowell said.
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“Despite its obvious advantages, questions remain about the nature of early fire use: When did fire use become a regular part of the human behavioral repertoire? Were early humans dependent on the opportunistic use of wildfires and lightning strikes? Was fire rediscovered several times?” Nowell said.
His ancestors A wise man they were living in Africa 400,000 years ago and probably not interacting with early Neanderthals half a world away.
“We don’t know if A wise man at that time it had the ability to make fire,” Stringer said, because to date there is no clear evidence for fire control before Barnham.
This means that Neanderthals would have invented ways to make and control fire somewhere in mainland Europe, which then allowed our human cousins to move further north into England, warming and lighting their way with fire.
“It is plausible that the fire will be more contained in Europe and spread to Africa,” Ashton said. “We have to keep an open mind.”