Use of fire by Peking Man goes back 600,000 years
Chinese scientists are saying an early human ancestor, Peking Man, set up fireplaces and cooked food about 600,000 years ago—the earliest evidence for fire use by a human species yet. They found fireplaces enclosed by a circle of rocks and burned rocks, soil and bones at an important fossil site in the suburbs of Beijing.
Gao Xing, with the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said archaeologists have spent three years excavating a fossil site called Zhoukoudian in the western suburbs of Beijing. They found lime that he says resulted from limestone being burned.
“Some of the animal bones were entirely carbonized, turned black both outside and inside. It is safe for us to conclude that this is the result of burning,” Gao said, China.org.cn reports.
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Peking Man (Sinanthropus pekinensis) was not a single individual, but a species of Homo erectus who were very similar to modern humans, having a large brain, and similar skull and bone sizes, but who had heavy brows and large, chinless jaws. They lived between 750,000 and 200,000 years ago.
Earlier this year scientists announced they'd found a single tooth of a Peking Man woman 30 to 40 years old when she died—quite old for that time, scientists say. The tooth was in a rare and important shipment of fossil finds – forgotten for decades in an unopened box in museum storage. The box was rediscovered, and it is giving experts new knowledge about Peking Man, considered an ancient ancestor of modern humans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peking_Man