Fire had been around for at least a few 10s of 1000s of years-people developed a liking for being warm and cooking food pretty early on...
Evidence for the “microscopic traces of wood ash” as controlled use of fire by Homo erectus sapien, beginning some 1,000,000 years ago, has wide scholarly support. Estimates based on fossil evidence put the most recent common ancestor of humans and chimps on Earth anywhere from 2 million to 10 million years ago according to Asger Hobolth of North Carolina State University using DNA comparisons. So there was a span of, at least, 1M years before fire that man was consuming food.
Fire was put into use around the time Paranthropus, the other human, suddenly disappeared. For those who don’t know of him, he would be the forerunner of what we now call bigfoot. It was very tall at around 10 feet, total body hair, and a day hunter. Sapien was a night creature and hunter. He was too much of a wuss to face the day animals. Unlike paranthropus, he lacked speed, long teeth and fierceness. Casualties and death were a real occurrence when the sun was out and they were too. Sapien was a tree dweller.
Wy69