When did we start making fire?

This is what Wiki has to say about it:

“Worship or deification of fire (also pyrodulia, pyrolatry or pyrolatria) is known from various religions. Fire has been an important part of human culture since the Lower Paleolithic. The earliest known traces of controlled fire were found at Gesher Benot Ya‘aqov, Israel and dated to an age of 790,000 years, and religious or animist notions connected to fire must be assumed to reach back to such early pre-Homo sapiens times.”

It was before Homo Sapiens. One hypothesis I read states that only after people started cooking their food (which made it more digestible and nutritious to us) did they have the wherewithal to grow big brains, and things spiralled upward from there.

There was a 1981 movie with Rae Dawn Chong about this subject, called Quest for Fire. Here’s a clip on the topic with narration. The film itself has no dialogue in it. It was actually quite funny.

~ I’m pretty sure it was right after Prometheus gave it to us. But that’s just something I read…

I heard he was pretty generous:
Prometheus gave the mortals all sorts of gifts: brickwork, woodworking, telling the seasons by the stars, numbers, the alphabet (for remembering things), yoked oxen, carriages, saddles, ships and sails. He also gave other gifts: healing drugs, seercraft, signs in the sky, the mining of precious metals, animal sacrifice and all art.

The gift of divine fire unleashed a flood of inventiveness, productivity and, most of all, respect for the immortal gods in the rapidly developing mortals. Within no time (by Immortal standards), culture, art, and literacy permeated the land