考古學家發現最古老的生火證據（2/2）

Recently the New York Times reported the following:

Archaeologists Find Oldest Evidence of Fire-Making (2/2)

Neanderthals 400,000 years ago were striking flints to make fires, researchers have found.

By Carl Zimmer

Dec. 10, 2025

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For years afterward, the researchers returned to Barnham hoping to tackle that question, without any further success. Finally, on a summer day in 2021, Dr. Ashton had a thought. As he prepared to take a nap under an oak tree, he recalled how, a couple of years earlier, he had glimpsed an intriguing streak of red clay. The nap could wait.

“I thought, I’ll have a little poke around,” Dr. Ashton said.

He found the red streak, and quickly realized that it was a two-foot-wide band of burned ancient soil. Had humans burned it, or had lighting? Dr. Ashton and his colleagues put the two possibilities to a test.

Over the next four years, they analyzed the chemistry of the sediment, while conducting further digs around it. Eventually they determined that, about 400,000 years ago, the site had been a watering hole, which Neanderthals probably visited in search of game.

A wildfire would have left evidence far from the site, but the researchers found none. What’s more, the same patch had been burned repeatedly over the course of decades. And the fires there reached intense temperatures and burned for hours. The researchers grew increasingly certain that generations of Neanderthals had intentionally set fires at Barnham.

A last major clue came to light with the discovery of pieces of pyrite alongside heat-shattered flints. Anthropologists have documented many groups of hunter-gatherers around the world who make fires by striking pyrite against flint.

All the more notable, Dr. Ashton said, was that the rocks for miles around Barnham don’t contain pyrite. He speculated that the fire-making Neanderthals must have brought pieces of it to Barnham. The nearest known source of the mineral is some 40 miles to the east.

The pyrite was “the icing on the cake,” said Ségolène Vandevelde, an archaeologist at the University of Quebec in Chicoutimi who was not involved in the new study. “Altogether, it’s a really convincing case.”

But a question remains: How widespread was fire-making 400,000 years ago?

Perhaps not very, said Michael Chazan, an anthropologist at the University of Toronto who was not involved in the research. Other Neanderthals across Europe and the Near East might still have been collecting their embers from natural fires. Only at a place like Barnham did they have the right opportunity to learn how to make fires.

“This experiment seems to be local in scope,” Dr. Chazan said. “It still stands to reason that many Neanderthal groups did not have access to materials that could be used to strike a light.”

Dr. Ashton is more optimistic. He speculated that fire-making might have become widespread hundreds of thousands of years ago, not just among Neanderthals, but also among Denisovans in Asia and modern humans in Africa. Anyone encountering people who had mastered fire would have wanted to copy them.

“Once something suddenly takes off, I think it will spread very quickly,” Dr. Ashton said.

For the time being, Barnham remains the only place known for any evidence of fire-making hundreds of thousands of years ago. But that isn’t proof that the practice was rare at the time, Dr. Ashton said. After all, it had taken years of field work at Barnham to uncover the telling evidence. Similar efforts could reveal other Barnhams elsewhere in the world.

“One lesson that archaeology has taught me is that the more effort you put in, the more reward you get,” Dr. Ashton said.

Translation

考古學家發現最古老的生火證據（2/2）

研究人員發現，40萬年前的尼安德塔人就已經開始敲擊燧石生火了。

（繼續）

此後多年，研究人員多次重返Barnham，希望能解開謎團，但始終沒有任何進展。終於在2021年的一個夏日，Ashton博士突然有個想法。當時他正準備在一棵橡樹下小憩，突然想起幾年前曾瞥見一條引人注目的紅色黏土帶。午睡小憩可以等等先。

Ashton博士說: 「我想，不如去稍稍探索一下」。

他找到了那條紅色黏土帶，並很快意識到這是一條兩英尺寬的古代燒焦土壤帶。它是人類燒的，還是閃電燒的？Ashton博士和他的同事們對這兩種可能性進行了驗證。

在接下來的四年裡，他們分析了沉積物的化學成分，並在周圍進行了進一步的挖掘。最終，他們確定，大約40萬年前，這裡曾經是一個水坑，尼安德塔人可能曾經來此尋找獵物。

野生的火應會在遠離遺址的地方留下一些痕跡，但研究人員卻無發現。更重要的是，同一片區域在數十年間反覆燃燒。而且，那裡的火勢非常猛烈，持續燃燒了幾個小時。研究人員越來越確信，一代又一代的尼安德塔人曾在Barnham有意識地生火。

最後一個重要線索是，在被高溫裂碎的燧石旁發現了黃鐵礦碎片。人類學家記錄了世界各地許多狩獵採集群體用黃鐵礦敲擊燧石生火的習俗。

Ashton博士指出，更值得注意的是，Barnham周圍數英里範圍內的岩石都不含黃鐵礦。他推測，會生火的尼安德塔人一定把這種礦物帶到了Barnham。目前已知最近的這種礦物產地位於Barnham以東約40英里處。

魁北克大學希庫蒂米分校的考古學家Ségolène Vandevelde說，黃鐵礦是「把說服力再提升」。她並未參與這項新研究。 “總而言之，這是一個非常有說服力的論點。”

但問題依然存在：40萬年前，生火的普及程度究竟如何？

多倫多大學的人類學家Michael Chazan說，或許並不普遍, 他沒有參與這項研究。歐洲和近東其他地區的尼安德特人可能仍在收集天然火堆的餘燼。只有在像 Barnham 這樣的地方，他們才有適當的機會去學習如何生火。

Chazan博士說： “這項實驗似乎僅限於當地”; “由此仍然可以看出，許多尼安德特人群體無法獲得可以用來生火的材料。”

Ashton博士則較為樂觀。他推測，生火技術可能在數十萬年前就已經廣泛傳播，不僅在尼安德特人中，在亞洲的丹尼索瓦人和非洲的現代人中也同樣如此。任何人遇到會掌握用火之人，都會想作出效仿。

Ashton博士說: 「一旦某種技術突然流行起來，我認為它會迅速傳播開來」。

目前，Barnham遺址仍然是已知唯一發現數十萬年前生火證據的地方。但Ashton博士表示，這並不能證明當時生火技術十分罕見。畢竟，在Barnham遺址進行了多年的實地考察才發現了這些關鍵證據。類似的努力或許能在世界其他地方發現其他類似Barnham的遺址。

Ashton博士說: 「考古學教會我的一個道理是，付出越大，收穫越多」。

So, a group of Neanderthals has used flint and pyrite to make fires time after time over several generations some 400,000 years ago. This new finding indicates that fire making in human history occurred much earlier than we have thought. Yet this finding doesn’t prove that the practice was rare at the time. After all, it has taken years of field work at Barnham to uncover the telling evidence. Probably, similar efforts could reveal other sites somewhere in the world.