The discovery of fire, or, more precisely, the controlled use of fire was, of necessity, one of the earliest of human discoveries. Fire's purposes are multiple, some of which are to add light and heat, to cook plants and animals, to clear forests for planting, to heat-treat stone for making stone tools, to burn clay for ceramic objects.
Discovery of Fire
The controlled use of fire was an invention of the Early Stone Age (or Lower Paleolithic). The earliest evidence for controlled use of fire is at the Lower Paleolithic site of Gesher Benot Ya'aqov in Israel, where charred wood and seeds were recovered from a site dated 790,000 years ago.
Not everybody believes that; the next oldest site is at Zhoukoudian, a Lower Paleolithic site in China dated to about 400,000 BP, and at Qesem Cave (Israel), between about 200,000-400,000 years ago.
Hearth Fire Construction
As opposed to fire, a hearth is a deliberately constructed fireplace. The earliest fireplaces were made by collecting stones to contain the fire, or simply reusing the same location again and again and allowing the ash to act as hearth construct. Those are found in the Middle Paleolithic period (ca 200,000-40,000 years ago, at sites such as Klasies River Caves (South Africa, 125,000 years ago) and Tabun Cave (at Mt. Carmel, Israel)
Earth ovens, on the other hand, are hearths with banked and sometimes domed structures built of clay. These types of hearths were first used during the Upper Paleolithic (ca 40,000-20,000 years BP), for cooking, heating and, sometimes, to burn clay figurines to hardness. The Gravettian Dolni Vestonice site in the modern Czech Republic has evidence of kiln construction, although construction details did not survive. The best information on Upper Paleolithic kilns is from the Aurignacian deposits of Klisoura Cave in Greece (ca 32,000-34,000 years ago).
But of course, everyone knows that Prometheus stole fire from the gods, the Greek myth as reported by our Ancient History guide.
Sources
This definition is part of the About.com Guide to the Lower Paleolithic.
More information on the clay hearths is available at the Klisoura Cave glossary entry.
Goudsblom, J. 2004 Fire, human use, and consequences. In International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences. Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes, eds. Pp. 5672-5676. London: Elsevier.
Goren-Inbar, Naama, et al. 2004 Evidence of Hominin Control of Fire at Gesher Benot Ya'aqov, Israel. Science 304(5671):725-727.
Karkanas, P., et al. The earliest evidence for clay hearths: Aurignacian features in Klisoura Cave 1, southern Greece. Antiquity 78(301):513–525.
Karkanas, Panagiotis, et al. 2007 Evidence for habitual use of fire at the end of the Lower Paleolithic: Site-formation processes at Qesem Cave, Israel. Journal of Human Evolution 53(2):197-212.
This glossary entry is part of the Dictionary of Archaeology. Any mistakes are the responsibility of Kris Hirst.
