12/12/2025 at 5:36:51 AM
by gmays
12/12/2025 at 7:14:37 AM
Earlier BBC interactive: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46220201by ChrisArchitect
12/12/2025 at 7:32:40 AM
400k years ago vs 50k ago as we thought before. Anti clickbait headline. Should be edited. Human evolution was way slower than we thought.by throwaway290
12/12/2025 at 9:37:06 AM
Note that it is in no way new that humans were using fire back then. The oldest hint of deliberate control of fire are from ~2Myr ago, the oldest evidence that is generally considered conclusive is from ~1Myr ago.But that's not evidence for fires started by humans, only that people were managing fire. Prior to this find, the oldest evidence for a method of starting fire was from 50kyr ago. Archeologists generally consider this to be an artifact of what gets preserved, not proof of when people started creating fires. There is a lot of natural fire on the landscape over thousands of years, and teasing apart what is evidence for humans starting fire from what is found naturally is really hard.
So this is an amazing find, but it is not paradigm-shifting in any way.
by Tuna-Fish
12/12/2025 at 9:47:39 AM
from TFA> Fire allowed early populations to survive colder environments, deter predators and cook food. Cooking breaks down toxins in roots and tubers and kills pathogens in meat, improving digestion and releasing more energy to support larger brains.
> Fire also enabled new forms of social life. Evening gatherings around a hearth would have provided time for planning, storytelling and strengthening group relationships, which are behaviors often associated with the development of language and more organized societies.
seems very important to be able to start fire for this stuff. And if we were off by like an order of magnitude it's pretty paradigm shifting.
by throwaway290
12/13/2025 at 7:47:40 PM
We are very certain that people had fire. We just have no direct evidence for it, only indirect.Also, the ability to start fires is not necessary for having fires, there is some evidence of a practice of maintaining slow-burning fires for essentially forever, letting you catch some from a wildfire and then just maintain it.
by Tuna-Fish
12/14/2025 at 2:17:15 AM
So you are saying there was no consensus that humans started making fire 50k years before this discovery and AP news just lied?by throwaway290
12/14/2025 at 6:20:39 PM
They did not lie, you are reading things into the text that are not there.Firstly "Consensus that humans started making fire 50k years ago" is very different from "Until now, the oldest confirmed evidence ... about 50,000 years ago.". All archaeology has to contend with the reality that we have evidence of a very small fraction of the things that happened in the past, and archaeology focusing on the paleolithic doubly so. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Secondly, use of fire (which is what is needed for the scenes you quoted) and the ability to start a fire are two entirely different technologies that might be separated by a vast gulf of time. We have clear and accepted evidence of use of fire from ~1 million years ago, and fragmentary, contested evidence a million years before that. Prior to this find, we didn't have any evidence of people deliberately starting fires more than 50k years ago. These claims are not in conflict! It is entirely possible that people were maintaining fires they caught out of wildfires, for substantially longer period of time than has elapsed since we learned to start fires. Or alternatively maybe there was a method of starting fires that left no durable evidence.
This is still an amazing find! But it changes a lot less about what we know about or past than a careless read of it might suggest. It certainly does not hint that human evolution was slower than we thought.
by Tuna-Fish
12/15/2025 at 5:47:10 AM
You're overthinking it. TFA says> Scientists in Britain say ancient humans may have learned to make fire far earlier than previously believed
If you have the same definition of believed as me you have two choices: paradigm shift (350k vs 50k) or article (or British scientists) is lying.
by throwaway290