Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Discovery of Fire (Encore)

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hey everyone, this is Gary, and I just wanted to let you know that I'm going to be taking a brief summer break this week. So I've lined up some episodes from the archives that statistically I know most of you haven't listened to. And if you have heard it, it'll be a good refresher. I'll be back again with new episodes on July 23rd. When we think of what made human beings into human beings, one of the first things we come up with is the discovery of fire. The control of news of fire is one of the earliest things which our ancestors did, which separated us from other apes, and began us on the path to becoming modern podcast listening human beings. Learn more about how humans came to use fire on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

Starting point is 00:00:41 What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine. podcast from NPR. Before we start, there are a few things that need to be clarified. First, is that humans didn't discover fire any more than we discovered rocks and trees.

Starting point is 00:01:29 Fire was around before humans, so the discovery of fire would probably just have been whoever we defined to be the first human being. There was no first caveman who had a eureka moment when fire was discovered. What we are really interested in are questions about when people began to use fire, harness fire, and eventually create fire. Second, is that when we go back this far in time, the evidence becomes very sketchy. Organic objects don't tend to preserve very well, and the odds that any living thing should be preserved as a fossil is very, very rare.

Starting point is 00:02:02 Much of what we know is based on creating a narrative that fits the available facts, and the facts are changing all the time as we make new discoveries. Third, pinning down exactly when we became human isn't easy. For the purposes of this episode, I'm going to be able to be. to use human to refer to both modern Homo sapiens and all-related hominin species, which may or may not have been our ancestors. So, Homo habilis, Homo erectus, and Homo Hidalbergentus will all be considered human for the purposes of this episode, even though they may not quite look like you or me. They are all members of the genus Homo and come after the likes of Australopithecus.

Starting point is 00:02:42 That being said, we can confidently put the use of fire by humans, as late as 400,000 years ago. This evidence comes from the Kessam Cave in Israel. Here they found a plethora of evidence indicating charred bones, a hearth, and a layer of ash. This is important because it sets a lower boundary for when we can be certain that human beings were using fire. Also, the context of this evidence is important. Trees and grass don't grow deep inside a cave. If there's evidence of fire, especially repeated fires over a long period, it had to have been set purposefully. and bones found in the middle of a field might have just come from a brush fire and not from intentional usage of fire. Just because this is the most concrete evidence we have, doesn't mean that

Starting point is 00:03:27 humans weren't using fire far earlier. We just haven't found the same type of evidence yet. If we look at the other end of the spectrum, the latest estimates for when humans may have started to use fire is anywhere from 1.7 to 2 million years ago. And yes, a range of 400,000 versus 2 million is a very big difference. Some evidence for this upper boundary comes from the Wonderwork Cave in South Africa. Here they found evidence of fire deep in the cave, which most probably couldn't have gotten there from a naturally occurring fire. They also found evidence of ash in the same layer where stone tools were also found, but they didn't find any charring on the tools themselves. Other evidence that provides an even older date comes from open-air sites in Europe and Asia,

Starting point is 00:04:11 which can't be as certain as cave sites as fires might have occurred naturally. While physical evidence of fire is really the best evidence we can have, it's also very hard to find. And even if it is found, there can be conflicting factors like the fact that a fire could be natural that makes the evidence less compelling. There's other evidence that is out there, even if it isn't as direct. Previously, up in the advertisement, I mentioned the book by Richard Wengram. Wangram is an anthropologist and a primatologist from Harvard who has studied the bodies of other primates and humans. His hypothesis is that the evolutionary changes in the human body, can be explained via the use of fire.

Starting point is 00:04:49 There were two big changes to the human form, which changed as we evolved from australopithecus to Homo erectus and eventually Homo sapiens. Our brains got bigger, and our guts got smaller. The human brain consumes an enormous amount of energy. It requires energy and nutrient-rich food. The process began over three million years ago as early ancestors started to eat meat. The body also has only so much energy to expend on its various systems and organs. Less energy going to one system can mean more energy going somewhere else. This is known as

Starting point is 00:05:21 the expensive tissue hypothesis. In the case of humans, our digestive tracts shortened as our brains grew. Compared to other primates such as gorillas, humans have almost no sikum anymore. The human appendix is considered by many to be a vestigial organ, and many people have had theirs removed without consequence. The mouth of a human is far smaller than that of a chimpanzee, and humans do not have large teeth. What does all of this have to do with fire? Fire, or more importantly, cooking food with fire, can be thought of as part of the digestive process. A digestive system is designed to physically and chemically break down food. This is the same thing that cooking food with fire does. If you can cook your food, you don't need to devote as much energy to developing a long and energetically

Starting point is 00:06:08 expensive digestive system. You can get more bioavailable nutrients and energy from cooked food than you can from raw food, where all the chemical and physical breakdowns have to occur inside your body. In addition to the digestive component, using fire also expanded the available food sources which humans could use. There are many foods, especially tubers, which require cooking to make them safe for human consumption. Foods like cassava need to be cooked to transform it into an edible product. Most primates have a very narrow range of food that they consume, and thus a very limited habitat where they can live. The use of fire allowed humans to vastly extend that range and to migrate to every region on Earth. That is why every single culture, tribe, or civilization on the planet which has ever been found uses fire and cooks food.

Starting point is 00:06:57 Even Inuits in the far north who have very little in the way of wood for cooking will use seal and whale fat for fires to cook food. Looking at it this way, harnessing fire wasn't a result of human intelligence. Fire was the reason why humans became intelligent in the first place. Putting what we know and what we can hypothesize into a single narrative, it might go something like this. Very early human ancestors, probably going back to Australopithecus over two million years ago, probably came across a natural bushfire somewhere in Africa. There they found some dead animals and scavenge the remains. They liked it. It was easy food.

Starting point is 00:07:33 And they looked for more fires where they could scavenge more cooked food. Eventually, one of them picked up a burning stick and used it to create a new brush fire so they could get more food. Eventually, they realized they could get burnt food without a brush fire. If they carried this fire around, they could just start a fire to cook a dead animal they found, and eventually they could hunt their food. Carrying around this fire, known as a fire brand, was very important, and if the fire ever went out, they would have to find fire somewhere else, either from another tribe or from another natural fire. Eventually, and we don't know when, but the guesses that the humans in KSMK 400 years ago had figured this out, humans learned how to create fire from scratch.

Starting point is 00:08:14 This was the game changer, as it allowed humans to roam farther without having to always bring fire with them. Eventually, fire became the basis for things such as pottery and other technology and tools which humans created. So while the question of exactly when humans started to harness fire is a pretty open-ended question, and probably always will be, What isn't in doubt is the importance that fire had to the evolution and development of modern humanity. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Thor Thompson and Peter Bennett. I just want to thank everyone, including the show's producers, who support the show over on Patreon. If you'd like to support the show, just head over to patreon.com, which is currently the only place where you can get show merchandise.

Starting point is 00:09:00 Also, if you want to talk to other listeners about the show, head over to our Facebook group or Discord server, both of which have links in the show notes.

Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Discovery of Fire (Encore)

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