A 400,000-year-old tinderbox is found in eastern England
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.
Understanding how fire was brought under control is thus of great interest to palaeoanthropologists. And a new piece of the jigsaw has been unearthed from an old clay pit at East Farm, Barnham, in eastern England. It is the oldest evidence to date of the creation artificially of new fires, rather than the careful nurturing of existing ones derived from natural causes, such as lightning strikes. As they write in Nature, Nick Ashton of the British Museum and his colleagues have found evidence of what are, in effect, Palaeolithic tinderboxes.
This article appeared in the Science & technology section of the print edition under the headline “Sparks will fly”
From the December 13th 2025 edition
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