Humans learned to use and control fire much earlier than previously believed

Fire has licked the planet’s surface for more than 400 million years, scorching forests, clearing grasslands, and lofting smoke into the upper air. Yet pinning down when people stopped fearing flames and started steering them has been surprisingly hard.

A fresh analysis of a 300,000‑year‑old sediment core pulled from the East China Sea finds a sharp surge in soot about 50,000 years ago, a signal that stands apart from normal climate‑driven wildfire patterns.

The work, led by Dr. Zhao Debo at the Institute of Oceanology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, together with partners in Germany and France, strings together chemical, archaeological, and climate evidence into one timeline.

“Our findings challenge the widely held belief that humans only began influencing the environment with fire in the recent past, during the Holocene,” said Dr. Zhao Debo.

When humans began using fire

Researchers tracked pyrogenic carbon, the charred plant residue left when biomass burns incompletely, because rivers flush those tiny black flecks into coastal mud where they store a record of past fires.

Between 60,000 and 45,000 years ago that charcoal fraction doubled, then stayed high. The jump broke its long connection to East Asian monsoon strength, showing that weather alone could not explain the flames.

Parallel charcoal peaks in Europe, Southeast Asia, and the Papua New Guinea–Australia corridor line up with the same window, pointing to a continent‑scale shift rather than scattered lightning strikes.

Fire use spreads across continents

Archaeological hearths from Bulgaria’s Bacho Kiro Cave to northern Australia’s Madjebebe site cluster inside the same interval, confirming that campfires had become routine parts of daily life.

Genetic studies trace almost all non‑African ancestry to a single successful wave of Homo sapiens that left Africa about 50,000 years ago, matching the charcoal timeline.

While earlier humans played with sparks, evidence for habitual fire stretches back at least 250,000 years in Europe, those earlier experiments were local and intermittent. The new record shows the first moment when fire use scales with population growth.

Migration, cold nights, and campfires

The out‑of‑Africa travelers trekked into ice‑age Eurasia where nights dipped well below freezing. Fire kept predators away, cooked meat, dried hides, and allowed late‑night tool making.

“Even during the Last Glaciation, the use of fire had probably started to reshape ecosystems and carbon fluxes,” added Professor Wan Shiming, a co‑author on the study.

Controlled flame also opened new food groups. Roasting tubers breaks down starches, and heated stone cracks to yield sharper blades, advantages that likely boosted survival odds for the migrants.

Burning added carbon to land and ocean

Modern wildfires already release between 116 and 385 teragrams of pyrogenic carbon to land and sea each year, a sizable slice of the global carbon ledger.

When ancient people started burning wood on purpose, they nudged that ledger long before industrial smokestacks appeared.

Charcoal is stable. Some pieces survive for millennia in soils, some drift as dissolved black carbon into the deep ocean where currents can store it for thousands of years.

By pushing extra charcoal into these sinks, early fire managers may have offset part of the carbon dioxide they released.

Climate models that begin counting human impacts only with farming or factories might therefore miss a slow, earlier perturbation that started when nightly campfires became normal.

Early human fire use shaped climate

The East China Sea record shows that environmental influence is not a recent human monopoly. Small groups with stone tools and wooden spears were already altering regional fire regimes and, in turn, the carbon cycle.

That insight reframes today’s policy debates. If early people changed atmospheric chemistry with nothing but sticks and sparks, eight billion of us wielding fossil fuels carry far more leverage, and responsibility, than any ancestral hunter‑gatherer could imagine.

Fire management still shapes global climate in modern times. Prescribed burns reduce fuel loads but also emit smoke; savanna fires in Africa and Australia pulse greenhouse gases each dry season; boreal megafires now send record carbon plumes aloft.

Understanding the deep history of intentional burning helps calibrate those modern choices. Fifty thousand years later we still gather around flames, but the scale has ballooned from glowing embers to global power grids.

The study is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

—–

Like what you read? Subscribe to our newsletter for engaging articles, exclusive content, and the latest updates. 

Check us out on EarthSnap, a free app brought to you by Eric Ralls and Earth.com.

—–