“Fire-making is a uniquely human innovation that stands apart from other complex behaviours such as tool production, symbolic culture and social communication. Controlled fire use provided adaptive opportunities that had profound effects on human evolution. Benefits included warmth, protection from predators, cooking and creation of illuminated spaces that became focal points for social interaction,” says new research from a team led by British Museum egghead Nick Ashton.

“Fire use developed over a million years, progressing from harvesting natural fire to maintaining and ultimately making fire. However, determining when and how fire use evolved is challenging because natural and anthropogenic burning are hard to distinguish. Although geochemical methods have improved interpretations of heated deposits, unequivocal evidence of deliberate fire-making has remained elusive. Here we present evidence of fire-making on a 400,000-year-old buried land surface at Barnham (UK), where heated sediments and fire-cracked flint hand-axes were found alongside two fragments of iron pyrite—a mineral used in later periods to strike sparks with flint.”

“Geological studies show that pyrite is locally rare, suggesting it was brought deliberately to the site for fire-making. The emergence of this capability provided important social and adaptive benefits, including the ability to cook food on demand—particularly meat—thereby enhancing digestibility and energy availability, which may have been crucial for hominin brain evolution,” rhe abstract continued, curiously absent any mention of malicious arson or more innocuous types of arson.