On a hot September day in Texas Hill Country, the fire picked up, its flames popping the Jeep’s burning tires and airbags like plastic chip bags. Thirty or 40 feet away, a crew of firefighters, law ...

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 ...

It's easy to take for granted that with the flick of a lighter or the turn of a furnace knob, modern humans can conjure flames — cooking food, lighting candles or warming homes. For much of our ...