Neanderthals were the world's first innovators of fire technology, tiny specks of evidence in England suggest. Flecks of pyrite found at a more than 400,000-year-old archaeological site in Suffolk, in eastern England, push back archaeologists' evidence for controlled fire-making and suggest that key human brain developments began far earlier than previously thought.
"We're a species who've used fire to really shape the world around us," study co-author Rob Davis, a Paleolithic archaeologist at the British Museum, said in a news conference on Tuesday (Dec. 9). "The ability to make fire would have been critically important" in human evolution, Davis said, "accelerating evolutionary trends" such as developing larger brains, maintaining larger social groups, and increasing language skills.
