It’s been a longstanding question: when did we first learn how to light a fire? Archaeologists in the UK believe they’re much closer to an answer after unearthing evidence that early humans were deliberately setting fires in eastern England around 400,000 years ago.
The discovery at a Stone Age site in Barnham, Suffolk, represents a major shift in our understanding of early fire-making. The findings, published in Nature, push back the earliest known date by roughly 350,000 years. Until now, the oldest evidence of intentional fire-setting came from a Neanderthal site in northern France dating back about 50,000 years.
