Four hundred thousand years ago, near a water hole on grasslands bordering a forest in what is now southern England, a group of Neandertals struck chunks of iron pyrite against flint to create sparks, ...

At a site called East Farm in England, recent excavations revealed reddened silt, flint handaxes distorted by heat, and fragments of a mineral—iron pyrite—that could have been used to make sparks on ...

Some of history's most important inventions can be credited to the British, from the steam engine to the World Wide Web. Now, research places one of the world's most profound discoveries on our shores ...

Fragments of iron pyrite, a rock that can be used with flint to make sparks, were found by a 400,000-year-old hearth in eastern Britain. (Jordan Mansfield | Courtesy Pathways to Ancient Britain ...