History Books Torched: Neanderthals May Have Beat Us To Fire By Hundreds Of Thousands Of Years

Sometimes, when I'm just sitting around doing nothing in like a waiting room or something, my mind wanders. Pretty frequently, I start thinking about the first person to do things. 

And I don't mean fly or cram two dozen cigarettes in their mouth, I mean who was the first person to look at a lobster and say, "Y'know what? I bet its ass is mighty tasty. Maybe dunk it in a little butter… once we discover butter."

And they were right!

But the granddaddy of them all is who was the first human to create fire intentionally. That moment changed the course of human history, and for a long time, we thought we knew about when that was, but a new discovery has totally changed that.

It may have happened several hundred thousand years earlier than archaeologists previously thought.'

New evidence suggests people were making fire way earlier than previously thought. (Getty Images)

According to Live Science, archaeologists in the UK have been chipping away at a site called Barnham. There, they just made a big discovery: tiny flecks of iron pyrite, which point to Neanderthals having used fire-starting technology 400,000 years ago.

Iron pyrite is also known as "Fool's gold" — I had a bunch of it in my rock collection when I was a kid; I couldn't keep the ladies off of me back then — and it's a mineral that produces sparks when struck with flint.

But here's where things get kind of wild: iron pyrite is not normally found in that part of the world. This means that someone purposely brought pyrite to Barnham hundreds of thousands of years ago. 

Likely to make fire.

"We assume that the fires at Barnham were being made by early Neanderthals," Chris Stringer, a paleoanthropologist at the National History Museum in London and co-author of this study, said. 

The earliest instance of Neanderthals lightin' up was only believed to have been about 50,000 years ago. This finding pushes it back 350,000 years.

"(Neanderthal) are fully human," Stringer said. "They have complex behavior, they're adapting to new environments, and their brains are as large as ours. They're very evolved humans."

Oh, we know…