Archeologists Trace Back How Ancient Humans Tamed Fire 1 Million Years Ago

Fire has served its many purposes for ancient humans up to modern ones, providing light, cooked food, warmth, and universally accepted as essential to human life, although, uncontrolled natural fires such as ones caused by lightning also lead to disasters and habitat destruction.

If you are to trace back how and when fire was first discovered, you may get lost in time and undoubtedly think it as an event or phenomenon. Author of an article published in The Royal Society thinks otherwise. According to the article, discovery of fire use may be seen as a set of processes happening over the long term and eventually became embedded in human behavior. Moreover, the early encounters with fire "have been followed by an intensification of use which has had profound impacts on human culture and even biology."

In archaeology, direct evidence of early fire is rare, but a fragment of burnt material found in sites suggests that ancient humans may have begun flame taming up to 1.5 million years ago, ScienceAlert reports.

How and When Mastery of Fire Began

Indian people warm themselves near a bonfire in a slum area in Siliguri on January 11, 2011. As thousands of homeless people sought places in temporary shelters, more than 80 people were reported to have died due to the cold weather in Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous state. Photo credit should read DIPTENDU DUTTA/AFP via Getty Images

Scientists typically use visual cues such as reddening, discoloration, or warping and shrinking of materials to identify fire at archaeological sites. When you date back a discovery 1 million years past, it's safe to say that it takes more than that to detect it.

In the new study, researchers used a spectroscopic 'thermometer' to detect minute chemical changes and estimate exposure of stones and fossils to heat. According to archeologist Zane Stepka from the Kimmel Center for Archaeological Science in Israel, along with her colleagues, this 'thermometer' was used on flint artifacts found alongside animal fossils from a site in Israel, between 1.0 and 0.8 million years ago.

Although there was no obvious, visual indication of fire use at the site, the AI 'thermometer' revealed subtle chemical signatures of heating of around or greater than 400 degrees Celsius in a number of stone tools and pieces of tusk - indicating they had come in contact with fire. Moreover, the clustering of tools and bones in the open location suggests early hominins were actually controlling the fire.

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Presence of Fire Lacking Visible Signs

The new study published in PNAS highlights the possibility of extracting "hidden" information on pyrotechnology-related activities - a key element of hominin evolution - from other archaeological sites "to yield a renewed perspective on the origin, evolution, and spatiotemporal dispersal of the relationship between early hominin behavior and fire use," the authors wrote.

To counter the absence of visual signatures for fire and physical alterations, researchers used suite of spectroscopic techniques, but said that further use of the new technique could help reveal more about when and how our ancestors tamed the flames.

"Reexamining artifacts unearthed from other Lower Paleolithic sites, including those located in the Levant, may potentially broaden our spatiotemporal understanding of the relationship between early hominins and fire," the team writes.