Researchers say they have found evidence that early human ancestors used fire at Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa as long as 1.79 million years ago, pushing back one of the earliest known records of fire use by hominins by hundreds of thousands of years. The finding, announced in a 24 June press release from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and published in the journal PLOS One, matters because controlling fire is regarded as a pivotal step in human evolution, offering warmth, protection and a means of cooking food.

Wonderwerk Cave lies in the Kalahari Desert, roughly 90 miles from the Botswana border. Using a newly developed technique that detects signs of burning in fossilised bones, the team identified repeated evidence of fire deep inside the cave — including burnt animal bones nearly 100 feet in, and owl pellets apparently used as fuel. Because these traces were found far beyond the reach of natural wildfires, researchers argue that early humans deliberately brought fire into the cave and kept it burning. The date greatly exceeds a 2012 study at the same site, which had reported fire use dating to about one million years ago.