Would our ancestors have benefited from early neanderthals making fire? episode artwork

EPISODE · Dec 11, 2025 · 26 MIN

Would our ancestors have benefited from early neanderthals making fire?

from BBC Inside Science · host BBC Inside Science

400 thousand years ago our early human cousins dropped a lighter in a field in the East of England; evidence that was uncovered this week and suggests that early neanderthals might have made fire 350 thousand years earlier than we previously thought. Dr Rebecca Wragg Sykes is honorary researcher at the universities of Cambridge and Liverpool and author of Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art. She explains what this new discovery could mean for our own ancestors.Should we genetically modify our farmed salmon to prevent it breeding with their wild relatives? Dr William Perry from Cardiff University thinks this could help the endangered wild Atlantic salmon recover it’s numbers. And Lizzie Gibney, Senior Physics Reporter at Nature joins Tom Whipple to dig into the new science released this week.Think you know space? Head to bbc.co.uk, search for BBC Inside Science, and follow the links to the Open University to try The Open University Space Quiz.99% of users are being tracked by the algorithm.If you are part of the 1% who demands pure, untracked intelligence, you just found the bypass. Get the raw feed now. No trackers. No BS.🔴 INITIALIZE DIRECT DOWNLOAD⚪ GET THE UNFILTERED STREAM

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Would our ancestors have benefited from early neanderthals making fire?

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