Overview
- A British Museum–led team reports in Nature that deliberate fire production at Barnham, Suffolk, dates to roughly 400,000–415,000 years ago, pushing back the earliest direct evidence by about 350,000 years.
- Researchers identified a heated clay patch, flint handaxes fractured by intense heat, and two iron pyrite fragments, with analyses showing repeated burns exceeding 700°C at the same spot.
- The burned deposits were sealed in ancient pond sediments, enabling four years of multidisciplinary testing that the authors say rules out natural or accidental fires.
- Pyrite does not occur locally at Barnham, and its presence is interpreted as evidence that people collected and transported the spark-producing mineral to make fire.
- The likely fire-makers were early Neanderthal groups inferred from contemporaneous fossils at nearby European sites, and the findings underscore implications for cooking, cold-weather survival, social life, and technological advances.