PREHISTORIC humans may have harnessed fire to make hard, sharp stone blades soon after Homo sapiens emerged in eastern Africa 200,000 years ago. This might mean that complex tool use – and even language and art – arose far earlier than previously thought.
The idea comes from Kyle Brown, an experimental archaeologist at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, whose team found sharp stone blades dating from 47,000 to 164,000 years ago around Still Bay, east of Cape Town. After attempts to make replicas of these tools from the crumbly local stone failed, the team noticed that the ancient…
