Archaeologists have unearthed 400,000-year-old heated sediments and fire-cracked flint handaxes alongside two fragments of pyrite — a mineral used in later periods to strike sparks with flint — at Barnham, Suffolk, the United Kingdom. The discovery shows humans were making fire around 350,000 years earlier than previously known.
An artist’s impression of fire at Barnham around 400,000 years ago. Image credit: Craig Williams / The Trustees of the British Museum.
The ability of humans to make and maintain fires marks an important moment in human development: fires provided warmth, offered protection from predators and enabled cooking, which expanded the range of foods that could be consumed.
Indications of fires in sites inhabited by humans date to more than one million years ago.
However, determining when humans learned how to create fire is challenging.
Fire use probably began with opportunistic harvesting of natural wildfires before our ancestors mastered the art of deliberately starting fires.
Previous evidence for early fire-making has been found at Neanderthal sites in France dating to 50,000 years ago, where handaxes that seem to have been used to strike pyrite to create sparks have been found.
The new evidence discovered by Professor Nick Ashton, an archaeologist with the British Museum and the Institute of Archaeology at University College London, and his colleagues suggests that fire-making may have been happening 400,000 years ago in Barnham, the United Kingdom.
The archaeologists discovered heated sediments in ancient soils along with fire-cracked flint handaxes.
These features indicate that fire was being controlled in a human settlement, but it is the third finding that suggests that the fire-making was deliberate.
Two fragments of pyrite were discovered on the site; however, this mineral is rare in this region, leading the researchers to propose that pyrite was purposefully brought to the site to be used for fire-making.
Together, the findings indicate complex behavior in ancient humans at the Barnham site.
For example, these humans may have understood the properties of pyrite to use it as part of a fire-making kit.
Developing this skill would have provided many benefits, including the ability to cook food and potentially driving the advancement of technologies such as glue-making for hafted tools, which may have contributed to notable developments in human behavior.
“The people who made fire at Barnham at 400,000 years ago were probably early Neanderthals, based on the morphology of fossils around the same age from Swanscombe, Kent, and Atapuerca in Spain, who even preserve early Neanderthal DNA,” said Professor Chris Stringer, a paleoanthropologist at Natural History Museum, London.
“This is the most remarkable discovery of my career, and I’m very proud of the teamwork that it has taken to reach this groundbreaking conclusion,” Professor Ashton said.
“It’s incredible that some of the oldest groups of Neanderthals had the knowledge of the properties of flint, pyrite and tinder at such an early date.”
“The implications are enormous,” said Dr. Rob Davis, a project curator at the British Museum.
“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.”
“This extraordinary discovery pushes this turning point back by some 350,000 years.”
The discovery is reported in a paper published today in the journal Nature.
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R. Davis et al. Earliest evidence of making fire. Nature, published online December 10, 2025; doi: 10.1038/s41586-025-09855-6
