TORONTO, CANADA—Science News reports that evidence for the oldest use of fire by hominins has been uncovered in South Africa’s Wonderwerk Cave by a team of researchers led by Michael Chazan of the University of Toronto. The discovery pushes back the known use of fire by hundreds of thousands of years, based upon traces of fire use dated to one million years ago that had been discovered in the same cave. “I’m very comfortable saying it was between 1.7 and 1.8 million years ago,” Chazan said. He and his colleagues used a luminescence-based method of dating on burned bones from pellets regurgitated by barn owls (Tyto alba) recovered from the same archaeological layers in the cave as the fires. But the researchers do not think that Homo erectus, who used the cave some 1.8 million years ago, lit these fires. “This is not human ignition of fire; it’s collecting a fire on the landscape,” Chazan explained. This suggests that fire use by Homo erectus was only occasional, he added. Read the original scholarly article about this research in PLOS One. To read about the previous evidence of fire use found in the cave, go to "We Didn't Start the Fire...Homo erectus Did."
