Neanderthal hand axes were also used as lighters for starting fires

Neanderthals may have know how to create fire themselves

By Michael Le Page

Our ancestors started using fire at least a million years ago and cooking may have played a key role in our evolution.

But could early humans light fires, and if so how did they do it? In the case of the Neanderthals at least, we may finally have an answer.

Dozens of 50,000-year-old hand axes from around Europe have tiny scratches on their flat sides, Andrew Sorensen of Leiden University in the Netherlands and colleagues have shown. And the mostly likely explanation, they argue, …