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# The Earliest Known Lighter Ran on Fool's Gold
- URL: https://www.gottabekidding.me/the-earliest-known-lighter-ran-on-fools-gold/
- Published: 2026-10-20T10:04:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-20T10:03:59.000Z
- Description: The people who struck these sparks were not our species. When ours first learned the trick is anyone's guess.
- Author: Out of Bounds
- Tags: History

Somebody in Suffolk struck flint against pyrite 400,000 years ago, caught a spark and got a fire going. Then they came back and did it again on the same patch of ground.

That patch of reddened clay at Barnham, in eastern England, is the oldest known evidence of humans making fire instead of borrowing it. The find sets the clock on human fire-making over 350,000 years earlier than before. Evidence suggests early humans had been capturing and feeding natural wildfires for up to 2 million years. Lighting one on demand is a different skill entirely.

British Museum archaeologists, including Nick Ashton and Rob Davis, built the case from three clues found together. First, a clay layer turned red by haematite, which appears when soil rich in iron gets heated. Analysis points to several short, hot bursts, the pattern of small wood fires rather than a wildfire. Second, scorched stone tools; in one area, about three in four artifacts were cracked or reddened by heat. Third, fragments of pyrite, nicknamed fool's gold and so rare in that landscape that people went a long way to get it. Hit it with flint and it throws sparks that can light dry tinder.

The fire-makers were probably early Neanderthals, judging by a skull from Britain in that period. Our own species didn't arrive at Barnham for another 350,000 years. Nobody knows when Homo sapiens started striking sparks for itself. The research appears in Nature.

The decisive red layer turned up after Ashton left the main excavation to rest under a tree. Recovery days count.

**Read the full story at** [BBC, December 10, 2025](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-b9da7a6d-165b-492a-8785-235cd10e2e8e?ref=gottabekidding.me)

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**Hot Take:** Neanderthal is still a playground insult. Early Neanderthals were probably lighting fires on demand 350,000 years before our species even made it to the Suffolk start line.