SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Billy Joel famously sang, we didn't start the fire - it was always burning since the world's been turning. But that's not entirely true. Humans do start fires to cook, to heat, to gather around. Scientists have long wondered when we first learned how. NPR's Nate Rott reports archaeologists have found the earliest example yet.
NATE ROTT, BYLINE: It's easy to take for granted that with the flick of a thumb...
(SOUNDBITE OF LIGHTER SPARKING)
ROTT: ...Or the turn of a knob...
(SOUNDBITE OF STOVETOP IGNITING)
ROTT: ...You, a five-fingered mammal, can create flames, providing...
ROB DAVIS: Warmth, protection from predators, light, the ability to cook food.
ROTT: Rob Davis is an archaeologist at the British Museum.
DAVIS: It provides time after dusk, so extends the waking day.
ROTT: ...Giving people today and millennia ago - Davis's specialty - more time to sit around communally to tell tales, share ideas or beliefs.
DAVIS: So a really important development for human evolution.
ROTT: Archaeologists believe that humans and our ancestors have used fire for more than a million years, but for most of that time, early humans couldn't create it. They depended on nature to start one, like lightning striking a tree.
DAVIS: But it's not something you could have relied upon. Wildfires are seasonal. They're not necessarily predictable. So it's only once you can actually make fire that it can become kind of a, you know, a daily part of the routine.
ROTT: Which is why Davis and his co-authors - including Nick Ashton, from the British Museum - were so excited to find fragments of iron pyrite at a site in Britain where early humans were using fire more than 400,000 years ago. Iron pyrite - for you non-Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts out there - can be used with flint to make sparks. And Ashton says, It's incredibly rare near the location they looked at. So...
NICK ASHTON: We think humans brought pyrite to the site with the intention of making fire.
ROTT: Which would make the site described in the journal Nature the earliest known example of early humans making fire anywhere in the world. And they suspect it was Neanderthals.
ASHTON: For me, personally, it's the most exciting discovery of my 40-year career.
DENNIS SANDGATHE: We don't know of any other uses for pyrite other than to make sparks with flint to start fires.
ROTT: Dennis Sandgathe, an archaeologist at Simon Fraser University, was not involved in the new study.
SANDGATHE: And of all the dozens and dozens of sites across Eurasia and into Africa that we've excavated that have fire residues in them, nobody's ever found a piece of pyrite before.
ROTT: Sandgathe says it's hard to make broad generalizations about early humans' knowledge of fire based off of one site. It might have just been one group or one individual that knocked rocks together and accidentally discovered fire.
SANDGATHE: But then glacier comes along and populations collapse, and that technology is lost.
ROTT: ...Only for it to be discovered again. The point is, the story of humans and fire is not linear, Sandgathe says, but it's one that we continue to benefit from today. Nate Rott, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "WE DIDN'T START THE FIRE")
BILLY JOEL: (Singing) We didn't start the fire. It was always burning since the world's been turning. We didn't start the fire. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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