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.
"This is where it happened," he tells me in a reverent tone.
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.
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.
"That was a really key moment," Dr Davis told me, "It was then that we started putting the pieces together".
The team conducted geological studies which reveal just how rare iron pyrite is in this landscape. The ancient people went far and wide to seek it out as fool's gold was, to them, the most precious mineral in the whole world.
"The relationship of that pyrite to that hearth, to the burnt artefacts: it was then it all fell into place," Dr Davis tells me, cheerfully. No getting all misty-eyed for him, just pure joy.
The British Museum team found three crucial clues in this scientific detective story, all in the same spot: the fire, heated hand axes and iron pyrite which didn’t belong there. This was the first compelling evidence that the fire was deliberately created here so far back in time, Dr Davis told me.
"This is big. This changes everything," his enormous grin, getting wider still.
Other stone artefacts were discovered across the site, with those in one area being of particular interest.
Around three-quarters of the artefacts in one area show signs of intense heating - cracking, reddening and spiralling - indicating repeated exposure to fire.
But the discovery of heat-damaged hand axes and pyrite together wasn’t enough on its own to prove that humans were making fire there.
What the archaeologists needed was evidence of a fire that burnt for a few hours and then went out hundreds of thousands of years ago.
And, incredibly, in one corner of one pit at the site, that is what Prof Ashton found when he wandered away from the main dig to have a sit down under a tree.
"This is the area where we discovered this heated sediment and you can tell it's heated because normally the clay is quite yellowy orange, and this was a distinct red," he tells me.
Prof Ashton points to the key evidence: a thin layer of clay - a single layer among many in the wall of one of the pits.
The red colour comes from haematite, a mineral that forms when iron-rich sediments are heated.
Analysis shows the layer was exposed to several short, intense bursts of heat - consistent with small wood fires built repeatedly in the same spot, rather than natural wildfires.
So it seems a groove that was ground into the chalk by a glacier, filled with water and became a pond. Over time the pond was slowly filled with sediment, and perhaps thousands of years later, when the pond was drying out, the ancient soil that settled in its place became the ground on which humans built and lit their fires.
Why is it important?
Fire has been on Earth ever since there was first oxygen in our planet’s atmosphere more than 400 million years ago. There is evidence that early humans learned to capture, maintain, and use natural wildfires as far back as 2 million years ago. But the ability to create it was the key development that accelerated our evolution, according to Prof Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum.
"Having something that could give you instant fire when you need it, where you need it, was crucial for people moving into places like Britain 400,000 years ago – it made them more adaptable, enlarged the range of environments they could survive in, and helped catalyse the evolution of social complexity, brain growth and probably even language itself."
Prof Stringer adds that creating fire at will was one of the main drivers of a virtuous and accelerating evolutionary cycle.
"With the use of fire, a whole set of evolutionary changes become intertwined," he says.
But who were these people? A skull of the people living in Britain at the time shows that they were not of our species – but a different kind of human.
"The shape of the skull, little details on the skull suggests that she was probably a very early Neanderthal. Even 400,000 years ago, the Neanderthals were beginning their evolution. So, we think those fires at Barnham were being made by early Neanderthals".
The research team believe the Barnham hearth is one of many across Europe around the same time. But so far, it is the first place where people can be shown to have actually made fire rather than just tending natural flames. Prof Stringer believes similar technology probably existed at other sites, and that groups walking across the land bridge that existed between Britain and the rest of the European continent brought this knowledge with them.
"These people probably brought the knowledge of fire making with them. Having instant fire when you need it, where you need it, would have been so important in helping the adaptations of these people to that British environment."
Our species, Homo sapiens didn’t make it to Barnham until 350,000 years after these fires. Exactly when our kind first made its own sparks is still unresolved. But experts believe that once any species of human develops the technology, the idea spreads… well, like wildfire.
The discovery here – published in the journal Nature - begins a new search for where else different groups of humans including our own species, Homo sapiens, learned to use a technology that made us the inventive and innovative people we are today.
Illustrations by
Jodi Lai
Filming and additional production by
Kevin Church and Maddie Molloy
