A team of international researchers, including Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Dr. Liora Kolska Horwitz, has found evidence of the earliest use of fire in the Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa, according to a study published in the prestigious PLOS ONE journal earlier this month.

The new research pushed back the origin of intentional use of fire by several hundred thousand years, to as early as 1.8 million years ago. In 2012, previous research based on remains from a more superficial level of the same cave dated it to one million years ago.

The researchers developed an innovative technique to detect signs of burns on fossilized bones, Kolska Horwitz, co-director of the Wonderwerk Cave project with Prof. Michael Chazan of the University of Toronto, told The Times of Israel over the phone.

“In 2012, when we published the article about the Wonderwerk Cave at one million years ago, we had the indications that there was fire in a lower, older level. Now, we pushed the use of fire back to well over a million years ago,” she said.

The expert explained that the two levels are separated by around 80 centimeters of sediments.

The deeper level was in use between circa 1.79 and 1.079 million years ago.

“The sample we use for this study was close to the bottom, and therefore to the 1.8 million years ago period,” Kolska Horwitz said.

The evidence that fire was used does not imply that early humans were the ones igniting it; but the fact that it was found deep inside the cave suggests it did not reach that depth naturally, but rather was brought there on purpose.

“This is intentional use of fire, which doesn’t mean that people started it; they are two separate things,” Kolska Horwitz noted.

“We can say that it’s not a natural fire, because the fire is at least 30 meters in from the entrance of the cave, so it was not a wildfire that crept in,” she added. “There is also nothing in this layer that could have caused what we call spontaneous combustion, like guano [accumulation of animal excrement] that suddenly burns by itself due to the chemical........

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