BBCnews is carrying this summary of recent paleoanthropological findings concerning hominds and fire use. Using a new type of scanner, they have found evidence that 1.5 million-year-old fossils of burned bones seem to have gotten that way through the hot fire of a hearth, not the lower-temperature fire of a savannah wildfire. This represents a signficant "back dating" of fire use, which until now only seemed to go back about 250,000 years or so.