Evidence that human ancestors used fire one million years ago

[huherto]

I suppose it is possible that the "control of fire" was discovered and forgotten many times in the history of human kind.

[unimpressive]

There have been many things like this in human history. (See: The English learning how to cure scurvy, and then forgetting it.)

[BasLeijdekkers]

This means fire was used before homo sapiens existed, fascinating. We might have evolved to eat cooked/roasted food.

[tokenadult]

This means fire was used before homo sapiens existed, fascinating. We might have evolved to eat cooked/roasted food.

I thought a lot of the links to Richard Wrangham's research on the origins of cooking had already been widely shared on Hacker News. Here is a chronological list of a few stories on his research to show how this line of research has developed over the last decade.

http://img2.tapuz.co.il/forums/1_140989346.pdf

http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2002/06.13/01-cooking.ht...

http://evolutionaryanthropology.duke.edu/uploads/assets/Wobb...

http://www.amazon.com/Catching-Fire-Cooking-Made-Human/dp/04...

http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~anthro/articles/RW%20RC%20Ev%20...

I was very surprised when I saw the early dates (before the emergence of Homo sapiens as a species) for the earliest evidence of cooking. The current view is cooking actually enabled hominin evolution in the direction of smaller gut sizes and larger brain sizes, as is characteristic of Homo sapiens.

[alexqgb]

Rather, we became our big brained selves because our progenitors cooked their food.

[thangalin]

I drew a Cosmic Calendar, inspired by Carl Sagan's idea.

http://i.imgur.com/h6vYI.jpg

Looks like the time-line for fire needs to change. ;-)

[thangalin]

In case anyone would like it at a higher resolution, or cares to add their own interesting events, the source SVG file is in the public domain:

http://www.mediafire.com/?h57lwc1c7poesw0

[EREFUNDO]

If non-Homo Sapiens like Neanderthals and the more primitive Homo-Erectus learned how to control fire, I am beginning to wonder if Homo Sapiens actually figured it out on their own given the fact that there is now mounting evidence that we co-existed with a handful of these early hominids for several millennia.

[Oltmann]

It is worth pointing out that controlling and maintaining fire is distinct from knowledge of techniques to build fire ex nihilo. There are still groups that lack that technology.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinelese_people

[yelongren]

And fire past sunset must have been a huge boost to socialization and safety of the tribe.

[cristianpascu]

Or dating methods are all messed up. :)