Humanity’s love-hate relationship with fire

The remarkable archaeological investigation in a remote cave in South Africa has finally proved that early humans were using fire at least 900,000 years ago. The discovery adds crucial new information to the fascinating story of humanity’s love-hate relationship with that mesmerizing ancient element.

But it’s a story that is still full of unsolved mysteries.

Some scholars suspect that early humans discovered how to capture and use fire around 1.8 million years ago – but archaeological proof has not yet been found.

Different researchers have proposed a whole series of widely differing dates for the first fire-making technology (as opposed to merely the first human capture and use of wildfire-originating fire. But at present nobody really knows when fire-making equipment was first invented – although it is likely to have been at some stage in the past 500,000 years.

Fire has been a key component of human economies for many hundreds of thousands of years – but archaeologists have so far probably only succeeded in uncovering a small fraction of that remarkable story of fire-related human technological and cultural evolution.

Fire has been a huge help to humanity (and indeed has almost certainly helped shape human evolution itself – through the mediums of diet, the provision of warmth and protection against predators).

But it has also, on occasions, done immense harm. Over the millennia, settlements and cities have fallen victim to massively destructive conflagrations – and fire has long been exploited as a destructive force in warfare. But, as yet, prehistorians have no real way of discovering when fire technology was first used in anger.

And yet, our knowledge of humanity’s relationship with fire is steadily increasing.

Above all, research over recent decades has been revealing how human control of fire has helped in the development of human technology and culture.

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The new South African cave evidence proves that early humans were capturing and using fire at least 900,000 years ago (i.e. 600,000 years before the emergence of our own species, Homo sapiens).

By half a million years ago (in Southern Africa), humans were using pigments (possibly for body painting and other decoration) – and it is likely that fire was used to produce soot for those purposes.

By 400,000 years ago early people were constructing the first purpose-built hearths. What’s more, at around this time, thick ash deposits in caves in the Middle East and Europe, suggest the possibility that humans were able to use ash to cover smouldering slow-burning animal dung or charcoal, thus keeping oxygen out and heat in - and consequently preserving portable fire sources for several days.

By 380,000 years ago, early humans (in what is now Germany) appear to have been using fire to harden wooden implements - and by 300,000 years ago, in what is now Israel, they were using fire to heat flint, thus making that stone easier to knap (to turn into tools).

By 100,000 BC humanity had deliberately started using fire to shatter rocks -  and by 60,000 BC, Neanderthal humans were using fire to produce pitch to use as an adhesive.

Evidence for the earliest known fire-making equipment has been dated to 50,000 BC (in France) – and the first known use of fire in rituals (human cremations) dates back 40,000 years (in Australia).

But all those dates merely represent current knowledge.

As new investigative methods and dating techniques are developed, many of those dates will be pushed back, thus revealing the ingenuity of even older groups of our early human ancestors.

Humanity’s love-hate relationship with fire is only gradually now emerging from the mists of time.