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[00:00.18] These bones at the Denver Science Museum come from ancient bison.

[00:04.43] 20,000 years ago, ice age people built fires using bones like these from the animals they hunted in cold dry prairies.

[00:12.67] They had only grass and twigs from bushes, but no trees. So campfire wood was scarce.

[00:18.25] Their alternative fuel clearly was bone, because bone ash shows up in many of the archaeological sites that I have worked at.

[00:26.75] Now a team of volunteers helps Hoffecker make an Ice Age bone fire, starting with a paleolithic fire drill.

[00:33.66] I am not dreaming that it's gonna happen. We tried a bone drill. That's a lot of work. So we went to our methods with a Bic lighter.

[00:44.28] Volunteers feed the fire not big logs, but sticks, similar to the twiggy bushes that Ice Age hunters added to their fires.

[00:52.53] Then Hoffecker adds the main fuel: the bones of a deer carcass cut just hours earlier.

[00:58.91] The sizzling sound is mostly that fat burning off which is appearing to be very flammable.

[01:06.35] See if we can reach the ignition temperature of a bone which is high. It's over 350°C. It's much higher than wood. So it looks like maybe we're getting there.

[01:16.98] Ice Age hunters used mostly bones, but when Hoffecker adds more bones, flames turn to smoke. They saved the fire by going back to sticks.

[01:25.48] Some of the bone is burning, yes. Hoffecker plans to try more bone fires to better understand the Ice Age humans who lived in cold dry places 20,000 years ago.