There is no consensus on when hominids began to have controlled use of fire. The primatologist Richard Wrangham has suggested that several of the physical differences between the Homo erectus and earlier australopithecines (Australopithecus and Paranthropus) such as the smaller teeth size, smaller stomach, and larger brains may have corresponded to the adoption of controlled use of fire. Since Homo erectus evolved around 1.9 to 1.7 million years ago, this would suggest controlled use of fire around those times, but evidence for such fire use is scant. On of the earliest plausible sites for controlled fire use is Koobi Fora site near Lake Turkana in northern Kenya. This site has evidence for hearth and fire use, and dates back to around 1.5 million years ago. But, was this opportunistic use of fire started by lightening, or did hominids 1.5 million years ago have the ability to start and carry fire as they roamed?

The Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa shows good evidence for use of fire in a cave, which probably rules out lightening-caused fire, unless perhaps the hominids in that cave carried fire into the cave from a nature fire outside. Wonderwork controlled fire use dates to about 1 million years ago. Slightly more recently, the Gesher Benot Ya’Aqov site (in Israel) dated to about 790,000 years ago, reveals burned seeds, wood, and flint at the site, demonstrating that some hominids had use of controlled fire way back then.

Despite these scattered sites with evidence for controlled fire use dating to 1.5 mya, 1 mya, or 790 kya, the puzzling thing is that there are many, many hominid sites and areas of human activity, even in northern regions with colder climates, that show no evidence of controlled fire use at all up until about 400-300 thousand years ago. And then, fairly suddenly, almost all the hominid sites start to show regular use of controlled fire by 300 thousand years ago. How can fire use have existed perhaps nearly 2 million years ago, but not have been widely adapted until about 400-300 thousand years ago? Perhaps fire control was not widely mastered, and was a secret skill possessed by few; or perhaps the earlier controlled fire use sites represent opportunistic use of natural fires, and early humans did not possess the skills of starting fires or transporting and preserving fire over long distances or durations. At any rate, the earliest evidence for controlled fire use known currently dates back to 1.5 million years ago, and there is a hypothesis suggesting fire use began close to 2 million years ago. There is strong evidence for controlled fire use in Israel (Gesher Benot Ya’Aqov) and South Africa (Wonderwerk Cave) dating from 790 thousand years ago to 1 million years ago, but the archeological evidence for widespread and frequent controlled fire use, suggesting humans had widely perfected the skills to ignite fires at will, begins around 400 thousand years ago.

1. Hebrew University of Jerusalem reports on the importance of fire use by early hominids.
2. Richard Wrangham’s theory about early use of fire by Homo erectus.
3. A 2017 issue of Current Anthropology confirms the strong liklihood that the Koobi Fora (1.5 million years ago) site has hearths and represents controlled use of fire in the early Homo erectus times.
4. Oddly enough, there are many human occupations without fire during the Paleolithic, and a survey of European sites of early human sites suggests controlled fire use was only common around 400 to 300 thousand years ago, as there is no (or very little and ambiguous) evidence for controlled fire in European human sites from 400 thousand to a million years ago.

This work by Eric & Chun-Chih Hadley-Ives is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.