Image credit: Almos Bechtold.

The old cliché goes like this: humans mastered fire, and with it, we conquered the world. But a plot twist is emerging from the sediment of history. What if it wasn’t Homo sapiens who figured this out first? What if it was the Neanderthals, or their ancestors?

According to groundbreaking findings from England, Neanderthals were sparking their own fires 400,000 years ago — hundreds of thousands of years earlier than many anthropologists previously believed. With this new timeline, it’s looking increasingly plausible that Neanderthals might have actually taught us how to do it.

The Great Divider

We love telling ourselves that we are unique. We thought we were the only ones with advanced language, the only ones to use tools, and the only ones with culture. Science has slowly humbled us on that front. We now know that New Caledonian crows craft hooked tools to fish for grubs, and orca pods have distinct cultures and dialects.

But fire remained a great divider.

The site is now firested, but when early humans were there, it would have been on the edge of a thriving wetland ecosystem. Courtesy of Pathways to Ancient Britain Project. Credits: Jordan Mansfield.

It separates humans from every other animal on the face of the planet. It is the essential difference. Controlled fire means warmth in an ice age, protection from lions and wolves, and perhaps most importantly, cooked food. Cooking unlocks calories, making meat and tubers easier to digest, which provided the fuel for the massive expansion of the hominin brain.

We’ve known for a while that early humans used fire. We see ash and burnt bones at sites in Africa dating back over a million years. However, there is a massive difference between using fire and mastering it. It’s one thing to keep a bush burning after a lightning strike; it’s another to have the technology to snap your fingers and create a flame on demand.

The former makes you a scavenger of energy. The latter makes you a master of it.

A Spark in the Dirt

It might not look like much, but this tiny piece of pyrite is the key to understanding our early use of fire. Image Courtesy of Pathways to Ancient Britain Project. Credits: Jordan Mansfield

The smoking gun comes from a site called Barnham in Suffolk, eastern England. At first glance, the site doesn’t look like much, just a discreet, reddish patch of sediment. But thorough analysis proved this wasn’t a wildfire that scorched the forest at random. It was a controlled hearth.

Using advanced forensic techniques, including magnetic analysis and Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), the team discovered that this sediment had been heated to temperatures exceeding 750°C (1,382°F). That was the first clue. But then, they found the kicker: iron pyrite.

Iron pyrite is commonly known as “fool’s gold.” It’s found in many regions, but not naturally on the surface in Barnham. The dominant local rock there is chalk. Pyrite usually hides deep underground or requires rivers to wash it out. Researchers analyzed over 100,000 stones in the region’s natural deposits and found no pyrite at all.

Yet, right next to the hearths and heated tools at Barnham, excavators found fragments of oxidized pyrite.

This matters because when you strike pyrite against flint, it throws sparks hot enough to ignite dry tinder. This “strike-a-light” technique is well-documented in human history, used by everyone from Ötzi the Iceman to Victorian campers.

This strongly suggests that these early humans (ancestors of Neanderthals) knew exactly what they were doing. They didn’t gather pyrite by accident. Instead, they located this specific mineral, carried it across the landscape, and brought it to their campsite with the express purpose of making fire. Then they did just that: created fire.

The timing here is stunning. Controlling fire is regarded as a key threshold for human species, possibly the very technology that enabled us to become smarter and ultimately the dominant species on Earth.

If you can control fire, you can move into colder climates. You can occupy deep caves or open sites like Barnham. Most importantly, you can structure your day around social interaction by the hearth rather than just desperate survival. In fact, the researchers note that this technological leap likely coincided with the development of the “social brain.”

But here too, it seems, humans aren’t all that unique.

We thought we were the masters of fire, but Neanderthals or their ancestors were likely the engineers creating fires on demand way before humans. Turns out, we’re not that unique in this regard, either.

The study was published in Nature.