How the Ancients Made Fire

Podcast Transcript

One of the most critical developments in the course of human history was the control of fire.

Without fire, we probably wouldn’t have even reached the Stone Age, let alone the Industrial Age.

But how exactly did ancient people make fire? To make fire out of nothing is no easy feat, and it was a skill that had to be mastered for survival.

Learn more about how humans made fire on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

In a very early episode of this podcast, I addressed the topic of how humans harnessed fire.

Harnessed is the key term because at first, and possibly for hundreds of thousands of years, humans couldn’t actually make fire.

They found fire when grass fires or forest fires broke out, and then they would keep it alive and carry it with them.

At some point, some humans figured out how they could make fire without having to find fire in nature.

This was revolutionary. Maybe the first truly revolutionary discovery made by humans.

As we look back, the big question is, how did they do it?

There isn’t a whole lot in the archaeological record to help us in this department.

So, how do we know what ancient people did to make fire?

Most of what we know has come from the written records of ancient people, direct observations of native people, a few archaeological finds, and a branch of research known as experimental archaeology.

Experimental archaeology is a branch of archaeology that seeks to understand ancient technologies, practices, and ways of life by recreating them using materials, tools, and methods that would have been available in the past.

Rather than relying solely on the interpretation of artifacts and written records, experimental archaeologists actively engage in hands-on experiments to test hypotheses about how ancient people lived, built structures, made tools, cooked food, or started fires.

By attempting to replicate historical processes, researchers can gain insights into the practical challenges and efficiencies of ancient techniques, helping to validate or refine archaeological interpretations. This approach bridges the gap between theoretical knowledge and lived experience, offering a more nuanced and tangible understanding of past human behavior.

So, with that, I’m going to cover four known methods that people used to create fire before the advent of matches and lighters.

Before I get into these methods, there is something every one of these methods requires: tinder.

Tinder is any material that easily catches fire from a small spark, ember, or flame and burns hot enough to ignite larger kindling. It is the first critical component in the fire-making process, especially when using primitive methods, where the initial heat or spark is weak and needs a highly flammable substance to take hold.

Good tinder must be dry, fine, and have a large surface area relative to its volume, which allows it to catch fire easily and burn quickly. Natural materials that make excellent tinder include dry grass, shredded bark, especially from cedar, juniper, or birch, cattail fluff, dry moss, seed heads, and certain fungi like amadou from the horse hoof fungus.

Man-made tinders used historically and today include char cloth, which is fabric turned to carbon in the absence of oxygen, and finely shaved wood curls, also known as feather sticks. The key is that the material must ignite with minimal heat and sustain a flame long enough to light larger, less flammable materials, such as kindling.

With that, the first method is friction.

Friction obviously can create heat. Just rub your hands together vigorously, and you can see that.

There are several techniques we know of that can use friction to create embers.

The first is a hand drill. This is one of the simplest methods for creating friction. It involves a thin wooden spindle that is rapidly spun between the hands while pressing down onto a fireboard, which is a flat piece of wood with a notch and depression.

Dust accumulates at the notch and eventually forms a small coal, which is transferred to the tinder bundle.

A better technique than the hand drill is the bow drill. This was an improvement over the hand drill; the bow drill adds a bow and a bearing block, allowing greater speed and pressure with less effort.

You will often see this method in various survival courses as a way to start a fire. It isn’t easy to do, and it takes practice.

The Fire Plow is another friction technique that involves rubbing a stick back and forth in a groove carved into a fireboard. The motion creates a buildup of wood dust and heat, eventually igniting the material.

A final technique is a Fire Saw or a Fire Thong. Used in some tropical areas, this method involves sawing or pulling a cord rapidly against a piece of wood, creating friction to ignite tinder. Bamboo is often used in regions like Southeast Asia due to its fibrous nature.

All of these friction methods are possible, but are difficult to do if you aren’t experienced.

All of these friction techniques involve organic materials, which is why we can’t find them in the archeological record.

The second major method is Percussion-Based Fire starting.

This method involves striking materials to produce sparks, typically using flint and metal.

Percussion-based fire starting has ancient origins and represents a major innovation in humanity’s quest to reliably create fire. The earliest known method of this kind likely used natural materials such as flint and iron pyrite or fool’s gold.

When struck together, these stones could create a small shower of hot sparks capable of igniting dry tinder. This technique dates back at least to the Upper Paleolithic period, around 40,000 years ago, and was widely used by prehistoric humans across Europe and Asia.

As metallurgy developed, especially during the Iron Age, people began using carbon-rich steel in place of pyrite. Steel, when struck against flint, produced hotter and more consistent sparks. This transition marked a significant leap in the reliability and efficiency of fire-making.

Flint and steel became common tools across much of the ancient world, including in Roman, Celtic, and early medieval cultures. By the time of the Middle Ages, flint-and-steel fire kits were a standard part of everyday life, often carried in small pouches that also contained tinder materials.

The use of percussion fire-starting remained dominant well into the 19th century, even after the invention of matches, particularly in rural and frontier settings where matches were scarce or expensive. It was eventually superseded by more convenient chemical ignition methods, but percussion fire starting never disappeared entirely.

In modern times, the principle lives on in tools like ferro rods, short for ferrocerium rod,, which use similar mechanics but with more advanced materials. Even today, traditional flint and steel sets are still used by survivalists, experimental archaeologists, and historical reenactors, preserving a vital skill that once defined the boundary between survival and hardship.

The third method of ancient fire starting is Solar Ignition.

The history of solar fire ignition, particularly the use of burning glasses and reflective surfaces to concentrate sunlight, stretches back to antiquity and reflects humanity’s early understanding of optics and the sun’s power. While solar ignition was never the primary method of fire-starting—due to its dependence on clear weather and daylight—it held symbolic, experimental, and sometimes practical importance across various cultures.

The concept of using sunlight to start fires likely originated with the observation that certain natural crystals or water-filled vessels could focus light to a point hot enough to smolder dry material. However, the earliest reliable records of intentional solar ignition come from the classical world.

In ancient Greece, the philosopher and mathematician Archimedes is famously, though somewhat mythically, credited with using large mirrors to concentrate sunlight and set Roman ships ablaze during the siege of Syracuse in the 3rd century BC. While this story is debated and probably apocryphal, it reflects a real interest in using reflective surfaces for ignition.

Greek and Roman sources refer to polished metal mirrors and lenses used in religious ceremonies to light sacred fires. For example, in some temples, priestesses were said to use a “skaphion” or concave mirror to relight fires from the sun’s rays—a method that ensured the fire was pure and derived directly from a divine source.

The Roman author Pliny the Elder described burning glasses made of glass spheres filled with water, which could concentrate sunlight to ignite cloth or wood.

In China and India, similar optical principles were explored. Ancient Chinese texts mention the use of polished bronze mirrors, and by the medieval period, both Islamic and Indian scholars were experimenting with convex lenses for scientific purposes, including combustion. In the Islamic Golden Age, scientists like Ibn al-Haytham explored refraction and light focusing, further advancing the theoretical basis for solar ignition.

During the Renaissance and Enlightenment in Europe, the use of burning glasses became more common in scientific demonstrations. Large convex lenses or parabolic mirrors made of glass or metal were constructed to focus sunlight with astonishing precision, capable of melting metals or boiling water.

The final fire-starting method I want to cover is one that you might not be as familiar with, but works surprisingly well: fire pistons.

The fire piston is an ingenious fire-starting device that uses the principle of rapid compression to ignite tinder through heat generated by air pressure. Its history is both ancient and geographically specific, primarily associated with Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands, where it was used for centuries before being discovered by Western explorers.

A fire piston consists of a hollow cylinder, traditionally made from wood, bone, bamboo, or later metal, and a tightly fitting plunger. A small piece of tinder, often charred plant material or fibers, is placed at the end of the plunger. When the plunger is forcefully pushed into the cylinder, the air inside is rapidly compressed.

This compression heats the air to over 400°F, or around 260°C, hot enough to ignite the tinder, which can then be transferred to a larger tinder bundle to create flame.

The origins of the fire piston are not entirely clear, but they appear to date back at least several hundred years, possibly over a thousand. They were used by various indigenous cultures in regions such as the Philippines, Borneo, Sumatra, and other parts of maritime Southeast Asia.

The technology seems to have evolved independently in these humid, tropical environments, where traditional friction methods can be less effective due to moisture. In these societies, the fire piston was often crafted with great skill and passed down through generations.

European explorers and colonists encountered the fire piston during the 18th and 19th centuries and were impressed by its efficiency and clever use of thermodynamics.

This encounter helped inspire further experimentation with compression ignition, eventually influencing the conceptual development of internal combustion engines. In fact, the fire piston operates on the same principle as the diesel engine, which also relies on compression-induced ignition.

As clever as many of these fire-starting methods were, they all eventually fell by the wayside with the development of the self-igniting chemical match in the 19th century.

Fire starting is something that ancient people simply had to know. Without it, their lives would be much poorer.

I’m guessing that if most people, myself included, were forced into a survival situation where we had to make a fire out of what we found in nature, we couldn’t do it.

In that respect, ancient people were more advanced than we are.

It’s a good thing they were, because if they couldn’t start fires, the world would be a very different place today.