About 80 km from Prayagraj, in the Belan river valley (India), scientists found evidence of the first known controlled use of fire in the Country. "Before this, the first reported use of fire in the Indian subcontinent was from 18,000-20,000 years ago. Hearths were found in the same valley, considered the firs of human use of fire," Prasanta Sanyal, co-author of the study said.
     For this study, scientists from IISER-Kolkata looked at macrocharcoal (larger than 125 micron) from six archaeological sites in the valley - Deoghat, Koldihwa, Mahagara, Chillahia, Chopani-Mando and Belan. They found charcoal from buried soils, which were dated 50,000 years old. But that did not necessarily imply the result of human activity.
     "You can get charcoal from two sources - forest fires and human-made fires. Say, there was a forest fire in in the Himalayas. It could have produced this charcoal, which was transported and deposited," said Sanyal. "But we found that the structure of these charcoal samples was still well-preserved, which could not have happened had they been transported.
     Then, they reconstructed the climate patterns for the last 100,000 years. It turned out that the period the charcoal samples date back to was one of very high rainfall. "Besides, the vegetation was characterised by trees. Both factors are not very conductive to forest fires," Sanyal explained. "We concluded that the charcoal in these archaeological sites came from human use of fire."
     "This coincided with the period when [early humans] started creating different types of tools"” Deepak Kumar Jha, lead author, said. Once acquired, this knowledge - how to harness fire - was one that was transferred. "The use of fire was persistent from Middle Palaeolithic to Neolithic (from 55,000 to 3,000 years ago)... from the earlier prehistoric populations to the later farming communities," is reported in the paper.
     This is now the 13th oldest evidence of the use of fire in the world. The oldest is from 1.6 million years ago, at Koobi Fora in Kenya. Sanyal said, "If you see China, human-controlled fire has been discovered from 400,000 years ago. Why this gap? Maybe we have not studied Indian sites enough."

Edited from The Times of India (2 December 2020)