Humans were lighting fires from scratch a lot earlier than previously thought

The invention of the wheel aside, the lighting of the first fire is probably the best-known cartoonists’ trope about early humans. With good reason. Controlling fire is one of humanity’s most important technologies. Some, indeed, think that it was fire—or, rather, the subsidiary technology of cooking—which permitted the evolution of big-brained hominids. The extra nutrients thus liberated, along with the smaller gut required to digest cooked food would, the argument goes, have allowed more resources to be used to enlarge the central nervous system.