DISCOVERY OF FIREThe controlled use of fire was likely an invention of our ancestor Homo erectus, during The Early Stone Age (or Lower Paleolithic). The earliest evidence for fire associated with humans comes from Oldowan hominid sites in the Lake Turkana region of Kenya

At 1.4 million years of age, the Australopithecine site of Chesowanja in central Kenya also contained burned clay clasts in small areas.

The Lower Paleolithic sites in Africa that contain possible evidence for fire include Gadeb in Ethiopia (burned rock), and Swartkrans (270 burned bones out of a total of 60,000, dated 600,000-1 million years old), and Wonderwerk Cave (burned ash and bone fragments, ca. 1 million years ago), both in South Africa.

The earliest evidence for controlled use of fire outside of Africa 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. The next oldest site is at Zhoukoudian, a Lower Paleolithic site in China dated to about 400,000 BP, Beeches Pit in the UK at about 400,000 years ago, and at Qesem Cave (Israel), between about 200,000-400,000 years ago.

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