New evidence is pushing back the date of humans making fire to 400,000 years before present. This is different from humans using fire, and is specifically linked to making it.

From the article:

In a study published today in the journal Nature, a team of researchers claims to have discovered the earliest evidence of fire-making known to science at a Paleolithic site in Barnham, England, dated to over 400,000 years ago. It suggests that humans knew how to make fire approximately 350,000 years earlier than anthropologists believed.

While prehistoric sites in Africa indicate that humans have been using fire for over a million years, pinpointing when humans learned how to *make* it is difficult. People likely started using fire by collecting it from natural wildfires before learning how to start it intentionally.

This will be of interest to anyone who has made a fire by primitive methods, and also those with an interest in human history and evolution. I find the last line of the quotation interesting, as it reflects our western bias. We have a cultural assumption that knowledge progresses as our science teaches it. But in hearing the stories from traditional cultures, it is usually framed differently.

Assuming a generation length of 25 years, this pushes humans making fire back 16,000 generations. That’s a whole lot of ancestors.

Here’s a link to the article on Gizmodo.

And a link to the original study in the journal Nature.