14,000-year-old footprints in Italy's Bàsura Cave reveal the clever fire trick humans used to navigate total darkness

Around 14,400 years ago, Epigravettian hunter-gatherers used a clever fire trick in Italy's Bàsura Cave. They used small pine twigs, not large torches, to navigate total darkness. This showed a "tightly engineered lighting strategy built around pine twigs, group coordination, and careful resource control." Many footprints were found.