It's easy to take for granted that with the flick of a lighter or the turn of a furnace knob, modern humans can conjure flames — cooking food, lighting candles or warming homes. For much of our ...

Fire sits at the center of how people think about being human, yet its beginnings stay oddly vague. Most readers carry a hazy timeline shaped by textbooks, documentaries, and a sense that mastery came ...

Early humans may have created fire 400,000 years ago, according to evidence unearthed at an archaeological site in England. Although there is evidence that early humans used natural fire in Africa as ...

Around 400,000 years ago, a band of Neanderthals, or their ancestors, in Britain struck flint with pyrite and built a fire repeatedly in the same spot. Archaeologists studying the site think it is the ...

Fragments of iron pyrite, a rock that can be used with flint to make sparks, were found by a 400,000-year-old hearth in eastern Britain. (Jordan Mansfield | Courtesy Pathways to Ancient Britain ...