Fire and the first hearths

Controlling fire gave our ancestors warmth, light, safety and cooked food. Burnt bone and ash in Wonderwerk Cave, South Africa, about a million years old, are among the earliest signs of it.

Date: About a million to 300,000 years agoI · Early human ancestryII · Our species and the Old Stone Age
Place: Wonderwerk Cave, South Africa · Gesher Benot Ya’aqov, Israel · Beeches Pit, SuffolkThe whole world
Laid out as: An inventionA new way of doing something, link by link: what came before, the breakthrough, and what it changed.
Lessons: 4 planned, none written yet
Themes: Human origins and evolution
Technology and engineering
Farming, food and drink

The lessons we plan

Titles may change as they are written

BeforeAncestors could use a wildfire, but not make or keep one.

IAsh in Wonderwerk Cave
IICooking and the human body
IIIGesher Benot Ya’aqov: fire on demand?
IVGathered round the hearth

AfterFire became a tool: for cooking, warmth and light.

Still to come

The people and objects these lessons will cover

People

Francesco Berna
Naama Goren-Inbar

Objects

Burnt flint
Burnt bone

Where it sits

All of human history, era by era

Early human ancestry Our species and the Old Stone Age Farming and the New Stone Age First cities and the Bronze Age The Iron Age and growing states The classical world After the empires Medieval networks and empires Oceans crossed Revolutions and the first factories Industry, empire and world war The world since 1945

1,002,000 years ago to 317,000 years ago. Each era is drawn the same width, so the earliest are squeezed: era II alone is over 300,000 years.

Nearby in time and place

The long human story written
Out of Africa outline

This page is an outline. The summary above is a starting point; each lesson, when it is written, will give its sources, its pictures and where historians disagree. Spotted a mistake?