Anyone who has been stuck in the wilderness on a long cold night, or who has seen Tom Hanks dancing jubilantly in triumph after he was able to build his first fire in the film “Castaway” knows how important the discovery of fire was to the development and evolution of humankind.
Now it seems that discovery happened a whole lot further in humanity’s past than we first believed.
Israeli archaeologists digging at Gesher Benot Ya’aqov, a site in northern Israel, have unearthed the remains of burnt flakes of flint that have been dated to around 790,000 years ago — putting the discovery of fire 500,000 years earlier than past findings had indicated.
“Concentrations of burned flint items were found in distinct areas, interpreted as representing the remnants of ancient hearths,” said archaeologist Nira Alperson-Afil of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
This amazing find means that humanity’s earlier ancestors, the Homo-erectus, were using fire for various means in the Middle East eons before the advent of modern Homo-sapiens who, like Erectus, also migrated out of eastern Africa
The flint was important because when struck it creates a spark that can start fire building. There was a time when archaeologists have held to the idea that humanity first got the idea for fire from lightening strikes, but never figured out how to self-start a fire until much later. This was re-iterated in the 1981 film “Quest for Fire” starring Ron Perlman and Rae Dawn Chong. Finding charred flint-ends proves that early Homo-erectus were familiar with making and controlling fire from striking flint far earlier than believed possible. Until this discovery fire-starting was believed to have been invented by species Homo-heidelbergensis or its later descendent the Homo-neanderthalensis.
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