Fire leaves behind a simple story when it is fresh. Ash settles, bones blacken, wood chars. Over a million years later, that story becomes much harder to read. In South Africa’s Wonderwerk Cave, ...

(Kamila Kozioł/iStock/Getty Images Plus) When it comes to phenomena that may have changed the course of human history, fire ...

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A new study suggests early humans were using fire in South Africa’s Wonderwerk Cave as far back as 1.79 million years ago. Researchers found burned bones deep inside the cave, where natural wildfires ...

An international team in South Africa has pinned the earliest known use of fire by Homo erectus back to between 1.07 and 1.79 million years ago.

A field in eastern England has revealed evidence of the earliest known instance of humans creating and controlling fire, a significant find that archaeologists say illuminates a dramatic turning point ...

Inside the limestone chambers of South Africa’s Wonderwerk Cave, small fragments of bone have been telling a story that is only now becoming legible. The material itself is unremarkable at first ...

While few of us today know how to start a bonfire without matches or a lighter, learning to make fire was one of the most critical developments in human history. New evidence suggests humans figured ...

The discovery of fire was a major milestone in human evolution, giving our ancestors a way to stay warm, ward off predators, and eventually start cooking food. But exactly when this first happened is ...

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.