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 ...

Billy Joel famously sang, we didn't start the fire - it was always burning since the world's been turning. But that's not entirely true. Humans do start fires to cook, to heat, to gather around.

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 ...

Something about a warm, flickering campfire draws in modern humans. Where did that uniquely human impulse come from? How did our ancestors learn to make fire? How long have they been making it?

At a site called East Farm in England, recent excavations revealed reddened silt, flint handaxes distorted by heat, and fragments of a mineral—iron pyrite—that could have been used to make sparks on ...