Der Mensch hat 350.000 Jahre früher Feuer gemacht als bisher angenommen. Die Kontrolle des Feuers sorgte für Wärme, Licht und Schutz vor Raubtieren und ermöglichte es den Menschen, ein breiteres Spektrum an Nahrungsmitteln zu verarbeiten, was zu einem besseren Überleben, größeren Gruppen und der Freisetzung von Energie für die Gehirnentwicklung führte.

Humans mastered the art of creating fire 400,000 years ago, almost 350,000 years earlier than previously known, according to a groundbreaking discovery in a field in Suffolk.

It is known that humans used natural fire more than 1m years ago, but until now the earliest unambiguous example of humans lighting fires came from a site in northern France dating from 50,000 years ago.

The latest evidence, which includes a patch of scorched earth and fire-cracked hand-axes, makes a compelling case that humans were creating fire far earlier, at a time when brain size was approaching the modern human range and some species were expanding into harsher northern climates, including Britain.

The implications are enormous,” said Dr Rob Davis, a Palaeolithic archaeologist at the British Museum, who co-led the investigation. “The ability to create and control fire is one of the most important turning points in human history with practical and social benefits that changed human evolution.”

The people who made the fire at the site, in the village of Barnham, Suffolk, are unlikely to have been our own ancestors, as Homo sapiens did not have a sustained presence outside Africa until about 100,000 years ago. Instead, the inhabitants were probably early Neanderthals, based on fossils of around the same age from Swanscombe, Kent and Atapuerca, Spain, which preserve early Neanderthal DNA.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09855-6

I told my Dad this and he told me it was not true. Old people never accept new science. I hope this becomes mainstream. Our past is such a quagmire.

Grimes graves must have been even more important?