OUR ancestors learnt to control fire more than half a million years earlier than has been thought, an archaeological discovery in Israel suggests. Burnt seeds and fragments of wood and flint found in excavations at Gesher Benot Ya’aqov, in northern Israel, have been identified as the remains of a campfire or hearth laid 790,000 years ago.

Before the discovery, the earliest unchallenged evidence of fires that were deliberately set and controlled came from sites 250,000 years old, though there are tentative indications of earlier fire use in Africa. The findings have important implications for scientists’ understanding of how soon human beings spread from Africa to populate the globe.

The first good evidence for hominid settlements in northern latitudes in Europe and Asia also comes from about 800,000 years ago, and Gesher Benot Ya’aqov lies in the middle of the “Levantine corridor” through which the migrating early human beings would have had to pass.

This suggests that the taming of fire — according to Greek mythology, Prometheus stole fire from the gods — could have been the critical factor that allowed hominids to survive in the colder climates north of Africa.

“The colonisation of Europe, where temperatures probably dropped below freezing point at times, is generally tied to the use of fire,” said Paola Villa, a human origins expert at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

The Gesher Benot Ya’aqov excavations, details of which are published today in the journal Science, were conducted over seven years by a team led by Naama Goren-Inbar of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

The scientists examined the distribution of burnt wood, plant seeds and flint artefacts at the site, on the shore of an ancient lake, to determine that the fire damage came from controlled fires rather than natural blazes.

Only a tiny fraction of the total number of specimens found was burnt, ruling out damage from a wildfire triggered by a natural phenomenon such as lightning. This would have burnt a much larger proportion of the wood, flint and seeds.

Further evidence that the burning was done on a hearth comes from the pattern in which burnt flint fragments were found. These lay in distinct clusters, indicating campfires or hearths, while flint artefacts found elsewhere on the site were not burnt.

Richard Klein, of Stanford University in California, said the Israeli researchers had provided persuasive evidence that the fires were controlled. “I think they have made by far the best case yet for humanly controlled fire before 250,000 years ago,” he said.

In the study, the scientists sifted through 23,454 seeds and fragments of fruit and 50,582 pieces of wood, looking for burnt specimens. Large numbers of flint artefacts were also examined for damage. Overall, fewer than 2 per cent of the specimens were burnt.

No hominid fossils were found at the site, making it impossible to determine which human ancestors started the fires. Given the date and location of the site, the most likely candidates would be Homo erectus or Homo ergaster, though an archaic form of modern man, Homo sapiens, is another possibility, Dr Goren-Inbar said.

Anatomically modern Homo sapiens did not evolve until much later, between 200,000 and 150,000 years ago, and did not leave Africa until considerably later. The first evidence for the arrival of modern human beings in Europe comes from between 40,000 and 35,000 years ago.

Conclusive evidence for fire has generally been found only from hearths in cave sites not exposed to the elements, and most of these are less than 250,000 years old. Some much earlier African sites show sediment discoloration that could have been caused by controlled fires, but this interpretation is widely challenged.

Dr Goren-Inbar’s team said their results indicate that early human beings were using fire consistently at least 790,000 years ago.

“On the basis of all the Gesher Benot Ya’aqov archaeological data, we suggest that the hominins who frequented the shores of the lake for over 100,000 years knew how to use fire and exercised that knowledge repeatedly,” the scientists wrote in Science. “The domestication of fire by hominins surely led to dramatic changes in behaviour connected with diet, defence and social interaction.”

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