ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2016
The discovery of fire by humans: a long and convoluted process.
Review in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 49 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
49 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 382 citations in OpenAlex.
- NAT2 global landscape: Genetic diversity and acetylation statuses from a systematic review.PloS one · 2023Pooled it
- Burn Selection: How Fire Injury Shaped Human Evolution.BioEssays : news and reviews in molecular, cellular and developmental biology · 2026Review
- Is obesity the missing link? Ultra-processed foods and metabolic and reproductive outcomes: a narrative review.Frontiers in nutrition · 2026Review
- Experimental analysis of roasted and raw turtle butchery and implications for early human cognition and behaviour.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- The role of fire on Earth.Bioscience · 2025Review
- Onset of extensive human fire use 50,000 y ago.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Hydrogen Peroxide: A Ubiquitous Component of Beverages and Food.International journal of molecular sciences · 2025Review
- Novel wildfire regimes under climate change and human activity: patterns, driving mechanisms and ecological impacts.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Flame-forged divergence? Ancient human fires and the evolution of diurnal and nocturnal lineages in moorish geckos.iScience · 2025Article
- Precision nutrition across climates: decoding diet, tradition, and genomic adaptations from South Asia to the Arctic.Frontiers in nutrition · 2025Review
- Use it or lose it: A model-based assessment of the hypothesis that European Neanderthals relied on wildfires to create their campfires.Open research Europe · 2025Article
- A bioenergetic approach favors the preservation and protection of prey, not cooking, as the drivers of early fire.Frontiers in nutrition · 2025Article
- Article
- The human side of biodiversity: coevolution of the human niche, palaeo-synanthropy and ecosystem complexity in the deep human past.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Review
- Understanding the gut microbiota by considering human evolution: a story of fire, cereals, cooking, molecular ingenuity, and functional cooperation.Microbiology and molecular biology reviews : MMBR · 2024Review
- Is obesity the next step in evolution through brain changes?Neuroscience applied · 2024Article
- From fossils to mind.Communications biology · 2023Review
- Quantum Leaps in Human Biocultural Evolution and the Relationship to Cranial Capacity.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Nocturnal selective pressures on the evolution of human musicality as a missing piece of the adaptationist puzzle.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- The house as a mind.F1000Research · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
1 author at 1 institution in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Numbers of animal species react to the natural phenomenon of fire, but only humans have learnt to control it and to make it at will. Natural fires caused overwhelmingly by lightning are highly evident on many landscapes. Birds such as hawks, and some other predators, are alert to opportunities to catch animals including invertebrates disturbed by such fires and similar benefits are likely to underlie the first human involvements with fires. Early hominins would undoubtedly have been aware of such fires, as are savanna chimpanzees in the present. Rather than as an event, the discovery of fire use may be seen as a set of processes happening over the long term. Eventually, fire became embedded in human behaviour, so that it is involved in almost all advanced technologies. Fire has also influenced human biology, assisting in providing the high-quality diet which has fuelled the increase in brain size through the Pleistocene. Direct evidence of early fire in archaeology remains rare, but from 1.5 Ma onward surprising numbers of sites preserve some evidence of burnt material. By the Middle Pleistocene, recognizable hearths demonstrate a social and economic focus on many sites. The evidence of archaeological sites has to be evaluated against postulates of biological models such as the 'cooking hypothesis' or the 'social brain', and questions of social cooperation and the origins of language. Although much remains to be worked out, it is plain that fire control has had a major impact in the course of human evolution.This article is part of the themed issue 'The interaction of fire and mankind'.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.