Evidence is thought to be 50,000 years older than any previously finds 
 
 Early humans first began to master fire around 350,000 years ago, helping to drive the development of complex culture among our ancestors, new archaeological evidence has revealed. 
 
 Flint fragments discovered in a cave in the limestone cliffs of Mount Carmel, close to Haifa on the Mediterranean coast of northern Israel, have provided the oldest signs of humans controlling fire. 
 
 The Tabun Cave is an archaeological site that holds evidence of having being inhabited by humans and their ancestors for around 500,000 years. 
 
 Flints found in the Tabun Cave showed signs of having been blackened and turned red by flames while others showed characteristic round pits where part of the stone had flaked off in the heat in what are called 'pot lids' 
 
 By examining flint debris and tools found in the cave, archaeologists found that some of them show discolouration, cracking and small round depressions that are signs of exposure to fire. 
 
 The researchers looked at flints from 100 layers of sediment in the lowermost 16 metres of the cave. In those that are older than 350,000 years, none of the flints were found to be burned. 
 
 However, after that there is a sudden explosion in the number of flints that were exposed to fire. 
 
 WHEN DID WE START COOKING? Exactly when humans first began using fire to make their lives easier remains one of the most controversial topics in archaeology. The earliest suggested date is around 1.5 million years ago. However, some research suggests that our ancestors first began using fire to cook their food as far back as two million years ago. Cooking meat played a vital role in human evolution, making it easier to digest, reducing the time it took to feed and requiring smaller teeth. A study in 2011 by biologists at Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts compared the body patterns, DNA and other characteristics of modern humans, non-human primates and 14 extinct hominins. They found used the information to look for patterns when eating time began to reduce. They calculated that if humans were ordinary primates living off raw food, eating would take up 48 per cent of their day. However, modern humans spend just 4.7 per cent of their day to food consumption. They suggest that the evolution of smaller teeth in Homo erectus around 1.9 million years ago coincided with a change in diet that may have been driven by the cooking of food. 
 
 Given that wildfires rarely spread into caves due to the lack of vegetation, the scientists believe these flints were burned in the fires built within the cave by prehistoric humans. 
 
 The discovery means our human ancestors in this area of Israel mastered control of fire nearly 50,000 years before other widely accepted evidence found to support the regular human use of fire. 
 
 It could bring new understanding to the development of culture and human behaviour. 
 
 While 350,000 years ago, the lower Paeleolithic period, is too late for fire to have played a role in the development of human's big brains as some scientists have suggested, it would have played a key role in the origins of social behaviour, argue the scientists behind the latest study. 
 
 It has also been suggested that control of fire was one of the key developments that allowed early humans to spread into colder climates, but this expansion had already begun by 350,000 years ago. 
 
 Dr Ron Shimelmitz, an archaeologist at the University of Haifa who led the new study, said: 'Understanding the time frame of this "technological mutation" will help explain aspects of our anatomical evolution and encephalization over the last million years. 
 
 'It will also provide an important perspective on hominin dispersals out of Africa and the colonization of temperate environments, as well as the origins of social developments such as the formation of provisioned base camps.' 
 
 Early humans are widely accepted to have gained complete widespread control of fire by around 125,000 years ago with the ability to kindle and light fires themselves. 
 
 However, the time when human ancestors first gained this essential technological ability has been highly controversial. 
 
 Tabun Cave at Mount Carmel in northern Israel holds evidence of early humans from up to 500,000 years ago 
 
 The Tabun Cave was discovered in the limestone cliffs of Mount Carmel around 14 miles south of Haifa, Israel 
 
 Some anthropologists claim that early humans, such asHomo erectus, began exploiting fire as long as 1.5 million years ago while still in Africa. 
 
 However, much of this evidence - which consists of heated clays and charcoal fragments - is disputed and could have occurred as a result of natural bush fires. 
 
 There are some who believe that fire played an instrumental role in the evolution of early hominins around two million years ago when our teeth and guts became smaller. 
 
 They have also argued that fire played a key role in the evolution of larger human brains. 
 
 However, many experts believe that early uses of fire may well have been opportunistic where early humans used natural bush fires rather than lighting fires themselves. 
 
 The artifacts found at these sites often show few signs of burning, suggesting fire was not used regularly, according to Dr Shimelmitz and his colleagues, whose research is published in the Journal of Human Evolution. 
 
 They say their findings at Tabun Cave are supported by evidence from other recent discoveries. 
 
 Burnt flints, bones and ash found in the Qesem Cave in Tel Aviv, Israel, point towards the use of a hearth in this cave that has been dated to around 300,000 years ago. 
 
 Dr Shimelmitz, along with other researchers from the University of Haifa and the University of Arizona, said: 'While the earliest evidence of fire associated with hominin activities is much older, the data presented here indicate that fire became a regular and constant part of hominin behavioral adaptations in Eurasia only after 350,000 years ago. 
 
 'The benefits of fire for processing food, altering raw materials or enhancing social interactions would be fully realized only when use of fire shifted from opportunistic and occasional to habitual and regular. 
 
 Thousands of flints fragments with signs of exposure to heat and fire have been discovered in the Tabun Cave. They begin appearing in the lower Paleaolithic period around 350,000 years ago but none are seen before then 
 
 'Regular use of fire changed hominin existence and influenced the direction of evolution in our lineage in a diversity of ways . 
 
 'To the extent that humans' physical, cognitive and social evolution was affected by the emergence of habitual fire use, we should be able to trace evidence for such impacts most clearly in the hominins that inhabited the landscape over the last 350,000 years ago.' 
 
 Tabun Cave has proved to be a rich site for archaeological evidence and is thought to have been inhabited intermittently through the Lower and Middle Paleolithic ages between 500,000 and 40,000 yaers ago. 
 
 Around 82 feet of sand, silt and clay have built up in the cave, allowing archaeologists to date the signs of human habitation left in each layer. 
 
 Among the remains found there were the skull fragments and bones from a female Neanderthal, that is thought to be around 120,000 years old. 
 
 Large numbers of deer bones have also been found there, which has led to suggests that is served as a place where animals were trapped and then butchered by humans. 
 
 Hundreds of flint tools, used to scrape and cut, have also been discovered together with thousands of fragments that have broken off as tools were shaped. 
 
 Flint handaxes are among the stone tools to have been discovered in sediment layers in Tabun Cave in Israel 
 
 However, Dr Shimelmitz said it was still unclear how the fires were started in the cave and may have been either by sparking kindling or keeping fire alight from natural bush fires. 
 
 He said: 'The changes in burning frequency at Tabun and Qesem not only signal the point in time where the use of fire became habitual, but also indicate that humans had mastered the art of kindling fire. 
 
 'Unfortunately there are no means currently available to directly determine how ancient fires were started, so the latter remains simply a hypothesis for the time being.' 
 
 Dr Simon Underdown, an athropologist at Oxford Brookes University, said the latest findings in Israel were 'exciting'. 
 
 He said: 'While we have evidence of fire use going back to almost 1 million years, it only appears irregularly and does not seem to have be a widespread behaviour - perhaps just being used by one or two bright sparks. 
 
 'Crucially this paper shows that by at least 350,000 years ago fire was being regularly used as a tool by our ancestors. 
 
 'Having the ability to make and control fire, along with projectile weapons and stone tools, further cemented our position as an apex predator of the Pleistocene. 
 
 'Fire use is one of the most important developments in human evolution but also very difficult to recognise in the archaeological record. 
 
 'Burnt material could have been from intentional campfires or from natural events such as bush fires. 
 
 'Fire allows food to be cooked which increases the calories in the diet while reducing the amount of energy our ancestors needed to use collecting it. But fire was also an important social tool. 
 
 'The heat allowed expansion into cold areas and the light extended the day and offered protection from predators. ||||| Mastering fire was one of the most important developments in human prehistory. But it’s also one of the hardest to pin down, with different lines of evidence pointing to different timelines. A new study of artifacts from a cave in Israel suggests that our ancestors began regularly using fire about 350,000 years ago—far enough back to have shaped our culture and behavior but too recent to explain our big brains or our expansion into cold climates. 
 
 If most archaeological sites offer a snapshot of the ancient past, Tabun Cave provides a time-lapse video. The site, about 24 kilometers south of Haifa, documents 500,000 years of human history. “Tabun Cave is unique in that it’s a site with a very long sequence,” says Ron Shimelmitz, an archaeologist at the University of Haifa and a co-author on the new study. “We could examine step by step how the use of fire changed in the cave.” 
 
 The researchers examined artifacts previously excavated from the site, which are mostly flint tools for cutting and scraping, and flint debris created in their manufacture. To determine when fire became a routine part of the lives of the cave dwellers, the team looked at flints from about 100 layers of sediments in the lowermost 16 meters of the cave deposits. 
 
 In layers older than roughly 350,000 years, almost none of the flints are burned. But in every layer after that, many flints show signs of exposure to fire: red or black coloration, cracking, and small round depressions where fragments known as pot lids flaked off from the stone. Wildfires are rare in caves, so the fires that burned the Tabun flints were probably controlled by ancestral humans, according to the authors. The scientists argue that the jump in the frequency of burnt flints represents the time when ancestral humans learned to control fire, either by kindling it or by keeping it burning between natural wildfires. 
 
 The findings are consistent with data from several nearby sites. On their own, these other sites provide little information about when humans mastered fire, because they represent shorter slices of time and most are not well dated. But in combination with the long, detailed record from Tabun, they suggest that ancestral humans all over the eastern Mediterranean learned to control fire around the same time, Shimelmitz says. Earlier ancestral humans may have used fire occasionally when they could find it, but because their artifacts show few signs of burning, they probably didn’t use it daily, the researchers report in this month’s issue of the Journal of Human Evolution. 
 
 This time frame is consistent with that of European sites. A 2011 review dated routine fire use in Europe to between 400,000 and 300,000 years ago. Together with the new study from Tabun, the data suggest that ancient humans did not master fire until hundreds of thousands of years after they expanded into cold climates. There are earlier sites with evidence of fire, but these are rare and often hard to interpret, according to Paola Villa of the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History in Boulder, a co-author of the 2011 review. 
 
 The new study won't end the debate, however. A few researchers have argued that ancestral humans did not regularly control fire until more recently, and others, such as Richard Wrangham of Harvard University, think that our ancestors mastered fire much earlier. Wrangham has argued that our ancestors started cooking food about 2 million years ago, when humans evolved smaller teeth and guts. He credits fire for favoring the evolution of many human traits, including our large brains. 
 
 All of those changes began long before the rise of burnt flints in Tabun Cave. Although he calls the finds “exciting,” Wrangham is not convinced by the sequence at this single site. The earliest inhabitants may have used the cave in different ways, such as to gather materials or butcher animals, saving their cooking for open-air sites, he says. “We clearly need more information.” 
 
 But he and Shimelmitz agree that whenever it arrived, fire gave ancestral humans tremendous advantages, including cooking, warmth, light in the night, and safety from predators. "There's a reason people think we got fire from the gods,” Shimelmitz adds.
– As early human milestones go, it's as big as they get: the "invention" of fire. Or more precisely, the mastering of fire. Now archaeologists studying an ancient cave in Israel say they've figured out when humans managed the feat: about 350,000 years ago, reports Science. Researchers discovered that burned flints began showing up regularly around that time in Tabun Cave near Haifa. Humans were using the cave as long as 500,000 years ago, and they apparently had the occasional fire way back then, but they didn't learn to control it and start campfires at will for a while. 'While the earliest evidence of fire associated with hominin activities is much older, the data presented here indicate that fire became a regular and constant part of hominin behavioral adaptations in Eurasia only after 350,000 years ago," says Ron Shimelmitz of the University of Haifa, as quoted in the Daily Mail. Both stories says the study in the Journal of Human Evolution won't end the debate: Other prominent archaeologists say that controlled fire must have come along much earlier and played a role in the evolution of our bigger brains and smaller guts. (Click to read about the discovery of an ancient, busty statuette.)