I have seen it nosed around over the last few months that there is a claim out there that jews invented fire – or rather that first fire that has been located archaeologically has been in Israel therefore it is a ‘jewish invention’ – and I thought I’d address that here.
This particular claim comes from a misunderstanding of a 2022 ‘Times of Israel’ article ‘Old flame: Israeli researchers find evidence of fire use nearly 1 million years ago’ where they write:
‘Using state-of-the-art artificial intelligence, researchers in Israel have been able to uncover some of the earliest evidence for the use of fire, dating back at least 800,000 years ago.
In an article published on Monday in PNAS Science Journal, Weizmann Institute of Science researchers detailed the advanced, innovative method that they have developed and used to detect nonvisual traces of fire, giving a rare glimpse into the lives of early humans.
Archaeologists believe that the controlled use of fire by ancient hominins – a group that includes humans and some of our extinct family members — developed around a million years ago.
The prevailing theory, called the “cooking hypothesis,” states that the use of fire was crucial for the evolution of homo sapiens, with flames not only enabling the creation of more sophisticated tools but also making food safer to eat and increasing its nutritional and digestive benefit — providing more nutrients for brains to develop and grow.
While the theory is widely accepted in the academic community, researchers have found it difficult to find evidence of fire use at the early stages of humans’ evolutionary development, and thus do not have the necessary data to fully support it.
Traditional archaeological methods allow for the discovery of fire usage to only as far back as some 200,000 years ago, since researchers rely mainly on modifications to material by heat, for example color changes.
So far, evidence of fire use dating back to 500,000 years ago has only been found in five sites around the world, and data is sparse.
“We may have just found the sixth site,” said Dr. Filipe Natalio of Weizmann’s Plant and Environmental Sciences Department.
Natalio had previously worked with Dr. Ido Azuri, of Weizmann’s Life Core Facilities Department, to discover evidence of controlled burning dating back to between 200,000 and 420,000 years ago at several archeological sites in Israel using AI and spectroscopy. That partnership served as the basis for the latest project.
Joined by PhD student Zane Stepka, Dr. Liora Kolska Horwitz from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Prof. Michael Chazan from the University of Toronto, Canada, the team set out on an expedition to the Evron Quarry in northern Israel — an open-air archaeological site in the Western Galilee that was first discovered in the mid-1970s.
“When we started this project,” said Natalio, “the archaeologists who’ve been analyzing the findings from Evron Quarry told us we wouldn’t find anything. We should have made a bet.”
Previous archeological work at Evron, led by Prof. Avraham Ronen, uncovered 14 meters (45 feet) of animal fossils and tools from the Paleolithic era, dating back to between 800,000 and 1 million years ago, which made it one of the oldest sites in Israel.
However, researchers did not discover any evidence at the site of fire use.
With ash and charcoal degrading over time, the finding of such evidence at the site is close to impossible.
Before arriving at Evron, the team began by updating and advancing the AI models they have used before.
“We tested a variety of methods, among them traditional data analysis methods, machine learning modeling, and more advanced deep learning models,” said Azuri, who headed the development of the models.
“The deep learning models that prevailed had a specific architecture that outperformed the others and successfully gave us the confidence we needed to further use this tool in an archaeological context having no visual signs of fire use,” he said.
The main benefit of using AI is that it can analyze the chemical composition of materials and from there estimate the templates they were heated in.
With an accurate AI method in hand, the team could start fishing for molecular signals from the stone tools used by the inhabitants of the Evron Quarry almost a million years ago.
An analysis for the heat exposure of 26 flint tools previously found at the site showed some exceeding 600°C, with a tusk of an extinct elephant also showing signs of heating.
Besides being the clearest evidence for ancient fire usage at the site, the researchers said that the presence of the heat signature could also be evidence of ancient hominids’ experimentation with different materials.
The team believes that the technique could be employed not only to identify the use of fire but serve as a window into the origin of its implementation by early humans.’ (1)
The point of the ‘Times of Israel’ article is simply that Israeli researchers at the ‘Weizmann Institute of Science’ worked out a new method of dating sites of potential cooking and/or fires created by early man. The site they used to exhibit this was the Evron quarry archaeological site that is to the north of Acre in northern Israel which allowed them to date a cooking fire to circa 800,000 years ago, which makes it one of the oldest known sites of human cooking and fire use in the world but also one of the first in Eurasia.
This in itself is hardly surprising since for example in 2004 an analysis suggested that the cooking fire found at the Benot Ya’akov Bridge archaeological site along the Dead Sea rift in the Hula Valley of northern Israel which placed that fire at circa 790,000 years ago. (2)
Further the key to understanding this is twofold.
Firstly, we need to understand the earliest known use of fire by humans has been dated to circa a million years ago at Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa’s north cape (3) while we have suggestive evidence – although this has not been confirmed as fire – at Chesowanja in Kenya’s rift valley dated to circa 1.4 million years ago. (4)
So thus, even if we have evidence of the use of a cooking fire in what is now Israel circa 800,000 years ago or even a million years ago then it wouldn’t be the first cooking fire we know of archaeologically-speaking nor would it per se indicate that the first cooking fire occurred in what is now Israel just that the first one of which we have evidence comes from what is now Israel.
These are not the same things.
Secondly and similarly, we need to understand that even if evidence of the first ever cooking fire ever was found in Israel it doesn’t mean that jews – or their ancestors - are responsible for having performed it precisely because the historic population of what is now Israel has actually – to the chagrin of many jewish nationalists – been largely non-jewish and a mix of local Semite (for example the Canaanites/Phoenicians) and Indo-European invaders from the north (the Hittites) and the west (the Sea Peoples aka the Mycenaeans who then became the Philistines).
The area where these fires have been found have not been the old jewish homeland – essentially what was called Judea – but rather much further north close to where we know the Canaanites/Phoenicians mixed with the Hittites as well as some Philistines who settled there.
Thus we can see that contrary to some interpretations of the evidence: the jews didn’t ‘invent’ fire either.
References
(1) https://www.timesofisrael.com/old-flame-israeli-researchers-find-evidence-of-fire-use-nearly-1-million-years-ago/; this has been further explained in detail by Ruth Schuster in ‘Haaretz’ in 2025: https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/2025-06-03/ty-article/earliest-use-of-fire-not-for-cooking-israeli-archaeologists-suggest-in-new-theory/00000197-3606-d079-ab97-77471a330000
(2) https://www.world-archaeology.com/world/asia/israel/fire-first-use-of/
(3) https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4874402/
(4) Steven James, 1989, ‘Hominid Use of Fire in the Lower and Middle Pleistocene: A Review of the Evidence’, Current Anthropology, Vol. 30, No. 1, p. 1