Campfires served as social hubs for early humans

Picture yourself as a human 300,000 years ago. You are huddled inside a cave with friends, and there is a hunting party around a burning hearth. As you cut up the afternoon’s catch with a newly crafted stone tool, you chat — in whatever communication methods available — about your day. You lean over and whisper to your neighbor about the herd of deer you saw earlier roaming the mountains where you normally hunt. Your friend then suggests to the group that you all fight away the other people threatening to take your hunting spot.

This scenario might not be as far-fetched as it seems. A recently discovered hearth filled with ash and charred remains suggests that early humans actually held meetings around campfires like this. The hearth, located deep inside Qesem Cave in modern-day Israel, is near a site where archaeologists have previously uncovered traces of burnt ash and soil and cut-up bones of large game animals. The Qesem Cave hearth, which is almost two meters in diameter at its widest point, contains several ash layers, suggesting it was used multiple times. It is also surrounded by bits of stone tools.

Ruth Shahack-Gross, an archaeologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, thinks that the large size and hidden location of the hearth indicates it was used as a social gathering place for a large group of cave dwellers. These early humans possessed an impressive social intelligence and thus were likely to use fire for more than just cooking meat.

While scientists agree that the ability to control fire gives humans a unique status among animals, there is significant disagreement about which hominid species was the first to control this special tool. Scientists also disagree about the use of early fires. Examinations of Homo erectus, a species that dates from approximately 1.8 million years ago, show that the hominid’s teeth became smaller and more specialized over time. This suggests that the later Homo erectus’ diet changed from the tough handful of seeds and roots to a plate primarily composed of softer, cooked foods such as meat. This theory seems to be supported by the burnt soil, bones, clay and ash found in South and East Africa that date to over a million years ago.

In contrast, a study published by Terrence Twomey of the University of Melbourne in Australia argues that properly maintaining fire requires a larger mental intelligence, archaeologically determined from brain capacity, than that characteristic of Homo erectus. The paper presents a method for experimentally determining the social and cognitive ability needed to keep a fire going. The campfire found in Qesem Cave, which dates to around the time of early Homo sapiens, supports Twomey’s idea as it suggests that domesticating fire was a somewhat complicated social endeavor requiring long-term planning and group cooperation.

Regardless of which species was the first to control fire, the campfire discovery reveals significant information about the evolution of hominids. Even without advanced languages or the communication methods we have today, our ancestors may have been extremely social animals.