Monsoons fueled Turkana wildfires 1.75 million years ago
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- Rachel Lupien at Aarhus University led a team analyzing chemical signatures in Turkana basin sediments over a 21,000-year window around 1.75 million years ago, simultaneously reconstructing rainfall, vegetation, and wildfire patterns from the same samples.
- Lupien's team found that during the final phase of the study interval, rainfall rose to monsoon conditions—yet wildfire frequency climbed too, because extra precipitation drove vegetation growth that gave fires more fuel.
- Acheulean stone tools—refined multi-purpose hand axes suited to both butchery and plant processing—first appeared in the Turkana basin around 1.76 million years ago and persisted for roughly 1.5 million years.
- Rick Potts at the Smithsonian Institution, who first proposed the variability selection hypothesis in the 1990s, called the study "the first paper I've encountered to illustrate the emergence of the Acheulean as a response to ecological variability."
- John Gowlett at the University of Liverpool said the findings show "definite evidence that bushfires were there in their world," making it plausible that hominins experimented with harnessing natural fires for resource access.
- Matt Grove, a University of Liverpool co-author, argued "it is far easier to keep a fire going than it is to start one," meaning hominins could have exploited fire long before learning to kindle it.
- A separate 2026 study documented fire use between 1.07 and 1.79 million years ago at South Africa's Wonderwerk Cave, while tentative evidence of fire use in Turkana dates back to around 1.5 million years ago.
Why it matters: For paleoanthropology, the study delivers the first chemical-trace reconstruction of wildfire ecology across the precise window Acheulean tools emerged, giving the three-decade-old variability selection hypothesis its most concrete environmental correlate. The monsoon-driven biomass mechanism also implies fire exploitation could have preceded fire-making in our lineage.
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