Would our ancestors have benefited from early neanderthals making fire?

BBC Inside Science

BBC

Science

4.5 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 11 December 2025

⏱️ 27 minutes

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Summary

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.

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts.
0:07.0	My Christmas Mix is pure 90s festive nostalgia.
0:11.1	You know, the Christmas songs you listen to on repeat.
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0:14.3	Ho! Ho! No, no, no.
0:17.5	I'm all about the big hitting Christmas anthems.
0:20.4	Come on, guys. What about those tunes that really slay? It's Christmas kitchen disco season, surely.
0:26.4	Give me hip-hip-christmas bangers every day. Those Christmas tracks that are straight out of lapland.
0:30.9	Get all kinds of Christmassy. Just search Christmas music on BBC Sounds.
0:35.8	Hello and welcome to Inside Science from the BBC World Service.
0:40.4	In a corner of England 400,000 years ago, a bipedal ape made a spark, made a fire,
0:47.4	and kindled a new course for humanity.
0:50.9	But this, the earliest evidence of human firemaking, revealed this week, did not come from our human lineage.
0:59.0	It came from Neanderthals. What do we take from that? And our global science watcher, Roland Pease,
1:04.9	has had his head turned this week by plants that attract pollinators, not with a pretty flower, but with a warming glow.
1:13.5	Talking of different approaches to reproduction, should we be genetically modifying our domesticated
1:19.3	salmon so that they stop having sex altogether? And I'm joined by Lizzie Gibney,
1:26.6	senior physics reporter at Nature, to review the week in the journals.
1:30.9	Lizzie, what do you have for us?
1:33.0	We have something about just how persuasive chatbots can be and why that should worry us,
1:37.7	and some tantalising hints of dark matter.
1:41.2	Excellent. I look forward to being tantalised.
	...

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