" The domestication of fire—that is, the possibility of producing, preserving, and transporting it—marks, we might say, the definitive separation of the Paleanthropians from their zoological predecessors. The most ancient “document” for the use of fire dates from Choukoutien (about 600,000 B.C.), but its domestication probably took place much earlier and in several places. "

― Mircea Eliade , A History of Religious Ideas 1: From the Stone Age to the Eleusinian Mysteries