Homo Naledi, a fairly recent human like species, might have beaten us to using fire by few dozen millennia. So super cool if true it would mean we weren’t the first. Which is just plain damn fascinating.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21661-ash-traces-hint-at-cave-cuisine-1-million-years-ago/ [quote][c=000000]Some researchers claim that changes to early hominin anatomy hint that our forerunners began using fire to cook even earlier than this, though the evidence is hotly contested. Molars shrank and skulls grew around 1.9 million years ago, which according to Richard Wrangham at Harvard University reflects the moment that hominins developed a taste for cooked food. As this requires less chewing and digesting, the theory goes, it freed up energy to sustain a larger brain.
There is a huge discrepancy between the timing of these changes in hominin anatomy and the archaeological record of fire, says Chazan. “My heavy bias has always been that humans didn’t control fire until much later – until now.” In fact, he says, earlier evidence of fire does exist, you just have to look for it in the right way.[/c][/quote]
See the article link above for more.
One more even newer video from 2 years ago that has a different message towards the end. Some really neat images in it.
