https://www.pnas.org/content/108/13/5209#F2
There is no conclusive evidence that hominids before Neanderthal could create or use fire, only after 400,000 years ago and only in Europe do we see strong conclusive evidence for the ability to both crea…
https://www.pnas.org/content/108/13/5209#F2
There is no conclusive evidence that hominids before Neanderthal could create or use fire, only after 400,000 years ago and only in Europe do we see strong conclusive evidence for the ability to both create and use fire extensively........BAM!
In sum, the European evidence strongly suggests that the habitual and controlled use of fire was a late phenomenon, dating to the second half of the Middle Pleistocene, which is not to deny the possibility of occasional and opportunistic use of fire in earlier periods (5). In areas that are volcanically active and have high lightning-strike densities, such as the East African Rift and the Afar Triangle, hominins were regularly confronted with natural fires and their results. Early studies of the Homo erectus–bearing deposits at Trinil, Java, have already discussed the role of volcanic eruptions in the production of tropical forest fires and the resulting charred plant remains retrieved from the Trinil deposits (66, 67). Living in “fire-rich” environments may have triggered the repeated opportunistic use of natural fires in early stages of hominin evolution, but such use did not create an archeologically visible pattern. The evidence from GBY is suggestive of repeated use of fire at one location only, at ∼800 ka. Together with the claims from some early African sites, the GBY evidence might testify to a sporadic use of fire by hominins before the second half of the Middle Pleistocene. Early hominins had expanded their ranges into the northern temperate latitudes of Eurasia much earlier, however, long before GBY. The finds from Dmanisi, Georgia (68), show that the southern Caucasus was already occupied by 1.7–1.8 Ma, whereas hominins were present in northern China at least by 1.66 Ma, as shown by data from the Nihewan Basin (69). The evidence from Dmanisi and the Nihewan Basin is older than any of the abovementioned African sites with contested traces of fire use. We suggest that e..
