Events

How and when did humans start controlling fire?

Dr. Francesco Berna, Department of Archaeology, Simon Fraser University

The biology, diet, habitat, and behavior of our species are deeply entangled with the use of fire to the point that our survival is, essentially, dependent upon fire control. New archaeological finds in Africa and Europe revealed that the history of use of fire is more complex than previously hypothesized. Wonderwerk cave, in fact, provides uninterrupted human occupation spanning the last two million years and a complete cultural sequence comprising all known prehistoric stone tools cultures, rock art, and recent Bushmen and Boer frequentations. Our work using multiple lines of microscopically contextualized evidence shows that the cave preserves a series of intact prehistoric surfaces and evidence of fire associated with all the cultural assemblages. In particular, heated bones are associated with the Oldowan lithic industry dated to about 1.7 million years ago and remains of small camp fires with Acheulean stone tools dated to ca. 1 million years ago.

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