Early Humans May Have Used Fire 1.8 Million Years Ago, Nearly Doubling the Age of the Oldest Known Evidence for the Feat

In Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa, burned bones were found in a dirt layer associated with Homo erectus. The inhabitants probably hadn’t mastered fire-making, but researchers say they may have moved and maintained flames from a natural fire

Eli Stark-Elster | AAAS Mass Media Fellow

June 24, 2026

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For millennia, humans have told stories about stealing fire from the gods. In Greek mythology, the Titan Prometheus gifts fire to humanity after sneaking it away from the gods’ home on Mount Olympus. According to some Yukon peoples, the trickster Crow pilfered it from a volcano in the middle of the ocean.

But new findings from Wonderwerk Cave—a natural structure in South Africa’s Kalahari Desert occupied by human ancestors for nearly two million years—suggest that the discovery might have been a bit less grandiose.

In a paper published June 1 in the journal PLOS One, researchers who used a new technique to analyze burned bones report that Homo erectus, a hominin species that existed before Homo sapiens, may have used fire in the cave 1.8 million years ago. The findings significantly push back the earliest known evidence of archaic humans maintaining flames, which previously dated to about one million years ago and was also found in Wonderwerk Cave.

“Evidence of fire from such ancient sites is often subtle and difficult to detect,” says study co-author Liora Kolska Horwitz, a prehistorian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in a statement. “Our study provides new tools for identifying traces of ancient burning and reveals that fire was repeatedly present deep inside Wonderwerk Cave.”

The new analysis method uses the luminescent properties of burned bone to test for evidence of fire use. The researchers shine a specific wavelength of blue light onto bone fragments and look at them through a colored filter. Burned bones glow, while unburned bones remain dark.

“The main reason why we wanted to develop a new method is that [the standard ones] are quite expensive and invasive, as you have to grind up a small piece of bone and therefore destroy evidence,” Kolska Horwitz tells the Times of Israel’s Rossella Tercatin. “The idea was to develop a method that’s quick, cheap, and can also be run by people working in the field in a small field station.”

She and her colleagues used this technique to examine hundreds of rodent remains left behind in the cave by ancient owls. In a deep cave layer dated to being used between 1.07 million and 1.79 million years ago, they found evidence of burning—and alongside it, fragments of stone tools used by Homo erectus. This species of hominin was the first known to settle outside Africa, and it possessed the first fully human-like body plan.

“With a brain the size of early Homo erectus, you can make hand axes; I'm pretty sure you could manage fire collecting and maybe maintaining,” says Dennis Sandgathe, a paleoarchaeologist at Simon Fraser University in Canada who was not involved with the study, to Smithsonian magazine.

While the evidence does not imply that hominins ignited the fire, the authors say that the flames couldn’t have made it into the cave without a helping hand. The burned bones were at a site located around 100 feet from the cave entrance—an area too deep inside to have been reached by a natural wildfire, according to the team.

What could have made Wonderwerk so desirable to early fire-users? One possibility is barf. The barn owls that brought in the rodent bones also blanketed the cave floor in pellets—clumps of fur and other matter that the predators can’t digest, which are thrown up. The pellet material could have caught and smoldered when early humans carried fire inside.

“Some of us think the hominids were using the pellets as kindling to keep the fire going,” like how modern-day people use dried dung to feed fires, Kolska Horwitz tells Haaretz’s Ruth Schuster.

Wil Roebroeks, a paleoarchaeologist at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, however, is skeptical that “inferred heating” hints that early humans used fire in the cave, especially since the study authors’ interpretations rely on an assumption about the supposed fire’s distance from the cave entrance. Additionally, “the broader context of the Wonderwerk sequence . . . suggests that hominin fire use, if it occurred at all, was extremely limited and certainly marginal rather than habitual,” says Roebroeks, who was not involved in the research, to Smithsonian.

The study authors agree that the available evidence is still limited, and they’re not sure about the fire’s purpose.

“We have more and more evidence that fire is present. The question is, how they were using fire, what is it for and does [its use] intensify at a certain point,” says co-author Michael Chazan, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Toronto in Canada to Haaretz. “Finding burned animal bones doesn’t tell you the full story.”

The team hopes their new method will help researchers unravel details of our fire-using foundations at sites around the world. Anthropologists view the ability to use and produce fire as a crucial milestone in the evolution of our lineage. Some say that the beginnings of fire put our ancestors on the path that led to modern humans. 

The Greeks thought the flames came to them from high on Mount Olympus. For researchers, however, the answers may lie underground.

Eli Stark-Elster | Read More

Eli Stark-Elster is the AAAS Mass Media Science & Engineering Fellow at Smithsonian magazine. He is a PhD student in evolutionary anthropology at the University of California, Davis. His research focuses on documenting the methods used to induce altered states of consciousness across cultures—he conducts fieldwork in southern Africa, where he studies the shamanic use of hallucinogenic plants and fungi. His writing and research has been featured on NPR, Psyche and the Conversation. He also writes on his Substack, Unpublishable Papers.