Neanderthals Invented Fire-making

Conventional wisdom says that superior African homo sapiens wiped out Neanderthals, and became modern humans. But new evidence comes out all the time that the Africans were no more advanced than the Neanderthals.

The NY Times reports:

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 on Wednesday in 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.

They found evidence of Neanderthals using tools to deliberately and repeatedly set fires.

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.

For more, see Control of fire by early humans. Older humans were known to have made use of naturally occurring fires, but there is no proof that the Africans were able to start fires.