Stuff You Should Know - The History of Fire

Episode Date: March 24, 2026

The first fires came from lightning strikes. After that, no one is super sure when we started controlling it and then later, starting our own. But it's sure fun to speculate!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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a cappella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for grids. banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and friends on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Dr. Maya Shunker, a cognitive scientist and hosts of the podcast, a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become when life makes other plans. I wish that I hadn't resisted for so long the need to change. We have to be willing to live with a kind of

uncertainty that none of us likes. You can have opinions. You can have like a strong stance. And then there's your body having its own program. Listen to a slight change of plans on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of IHeart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too. And we're on fire with yet another fire episode of Steffy. You should know about fire.

Yeah, so Jerry asked me when you left the room. She was surprised we had done one on fire. And I said, well, we did years ago on just sort of more the nuts and bolts and the science of the actual thing that is fire. Right. But I commissioned this one from Dave, I believe, that's a little more along the lines of, like, what did it mean for people and, like, kind of when? You know, I wondered, like, did we learn how to make fire? Was there like a day that that happened? And do we know that day and that person?

And the answer is no. Unfortunately, we don't know. We not only don't know that also our technology will almost certainly never be so advanced that we will ever find out. No. And one of the reasons why is because there probably was multiple people at different times around the world who learned how to manipulate fire. And also, there wasn't just like a one day where fire didn't exist. And then all of a sudden somebody like strikes a flint and some shirt or something like that. And now there's fire.

It happened in stages, humans' interactions with fire. And luckily for us, even though there isn't one day that this happened, and we can't say like, it was Todd. Todd was the one who invented fire. It is a very fascinating subject. It's definitely up my alley. Yeah, and it may have also not been linear. We may have had control of fire for a while, then not for a while. Yeah.

So basically what everyone agrees on scientifically is that the discovery of fire was not an incident, but it was a process. Right. And the traditional story goes that Prometheus went on a quest for fire, ended up hooking up essentially with a human woman and found that humans were way better. than his own species. That's right. And we got fire from that. That's right. So we talked a little bit about fire and how much we needed.

I remember saying that I saw somewhere that we're obligate fire users, that we essentially needed it to survive. And that raised the question like, do we still need it? And the answer is yes, we use it still today. But the role that it played in human development is just staggering. Like, just the idea of cooking alone is, like, just that revolutionary change and all of the stuff that that unlocked for us, nutrient-wise, taste-wise. Let's not forget about taste. But then also, like, we made metals with it.

We made pottery with it. We kept animals at bay with it. Even mosquitoes. They don't like fires. We learned to do all these different things to interact and manipulate our world using fire. So the idea of not having fire. It's just terrifying. Yeah, for sure.

And, you know, I know we talked about this a little bit. There are theories that human language was born around the campfire because now people were awake and needed something to do when they sat around the fire. Like, talk about what they did that day. Obviously, fires would eventually power the fires that made steam possible and steam engines possible and birth the industrial revolution. So fire, very important. it's a technology which basically blew early humans minds.

Obviously, they didn't learn how to make fire at first and we're going to go through these stages. Like the first fire came from, you know, a lightning strike. But even that, you know, probably blew the minds of whatever was walking around back then and saw the ground on fire all of a sudden. Well, yeah, what I found fascinating, though, is the idea that fire is actually fairly new to Earth, you know, like Earth was a watery planet for billions of years.

And it wasn't until the atmosphere kind of congealed into its oxygenous state like it is now. And that vegetation grew and then you started to have lightning strikes too. You put all those three things together. Now you've got fire and it didn't exist before on Earth. That was not something I've ever really thought of before. I thought that was pretty cool. Yeah, I think they said the Earth has been kind of fire ideal. for about 470 million years,

which is certainly a long time, but not on the order of, you know, billions and billions of years. If you go forward in time a bit to about six million years ago, that's when the first hominemes appeared in Africa. So now all of a sudden you have the conditions for fire and you have, you know, I want to say people.

Has that even correct? Hominems are people, yeah. Okay, I just don't even know what people means. Hominens are people too, Chuck. That's what I think. All of a sudden, you had people that could eventually harness fire and then learn to make fire, or at the very least, realize the benefits and take great interest in fire. Yeah, they think actually it's probable. So the best way to kind of look back in this kind of prehistory where there's not only no written record or even an oral tradition, like there's no archaeological evidence at this point yet still even, right?

So it's all just complete conjecture, but a pretty good way to kind of. kind of approach the whole thing is to say, okay, how do animals interact with fire? Right. Because those first hominins were pretty close to the great ape ancestors we evolved from still. So you can make a pretty good case that they would have interacted with fire like other animals do it. Animals basically run away from it. They ignore it, depending on whether it's a threat or not.

And then some of them actually use it to their advantage. Like raptors have been seen picking up burning sticks and dropping them elsewhere to flush out prey in quarry, essentially, which is a jerk move, but it works. Yeah, for sure. And if there was ever any kind of wildfire that started because of a lightning strike, right behind that, you would see predators like wolves or even some birds either preying on the animals as they flee or just having a better hunting ground because things were now kind of burned down. You could see everything. Right. So you can make a pretty good case that early, early, early humans would have essentially been doing the same thing,

that we would have eventually figured out that fire offers things that non-firy things don't. Like, for example, we probably started foraging, was the first step, where after a wildfire, we might have been looking for things to eat and been like, this tastes way better than when I catch it and pull its head off and then start eating. Whatever's happening here, this fire is doing something great to this. Yeah, I mean, the idea of accidental cooked meat must have just been mind-blowing. Yeah. You know?

I mean, a rare steak is a thing of beauty in and of itself. But, yeah, I don't want to say well done. But yes, cooked meat is good, too. A cooked turkey leg is way better than a raw turkey leg. Yeah. Hey, I've never tested that theory, but I bet you're right. It's one of those things that you don't even have to try yourself. You just innately know it.

And it's from this era. Yeah, that's right. Gathering after foraging was the next step of sort of the discovery of fire. And that's when humans were like, hey, I have this fire. It may have happened by lightning strike, but I now have it in a little bendal in my hand or maybe in a log hollow. And I can carry this thing from one place to another now. or maybe it's just a tree branch if you're a little bit more of a simpleton

like Tukuk was. And now you can transport your fire from one area to the other and you can use that fire to flush prey out or to protect yourself from the saber-toothed tiger or whatever. Yeah, that's a big one that I hadn't really thought of before, but you keep animals at bay because animals are used to wildfires

and not going near them. So if you're a human or a hominin and you're huddling around a fire, the Sabretooth Tiger probably isn't going to come attack you right then. You never saw Jungle Book? Oh, very, very long ago. And all I remember is Ballou doing his thing. Yeah, the bare necessities.

Yeah, it's so great. Still probably my favorite, even among the moderns, my favorite Disney cartoon. My favorite's long been Robin Hood. That was always my favorite as a kid. Yeah, I liked that Robin Hood a lot, but you just can't beat. There's so many bangers in the Jungle Book.

Okay, all right. All right. I'll go with that one then I'll just stop I'll throw out my own personal favorite in favor of yours why would you do that I just I just want to get along okay uh all right so they're carrying fire around at this point um they may have discovered like a way to actually keep it going better like I know on the survival shows like a lone animal dung is a great very sort of slow burning way to transport uh transport fuel like a a burning cow pie, maybe? Yeah, for sure.

So that's the gathering thing. So we go from foraging, we have no control over, we just identify that it's something special to being able to move it around and keep it going. That's the key, thanks to the animal dung discovery of the cow pie. And then we finally reached the point,

and this is where all of the archaeologists and anthropologists and all the ologists want to kind of pinpoint. When did humans start making fire, ourselves. And we do have evidence of humans using fire very far back more than a million years ago. But for hundreds of thousands and hundreds of thousands of years between that point and where we are unambiguously making fire ourselves, there's a lot of room for interpretation. Yes, we were cooking or something or we were using a fire. It's clear that there were humans around this fire,

but it's not clear that humans actually made the fire. We may have gathered it. When did we start making fire? That's the big question in archaeology and anthropology. That's right. Boy, it sounds like a – I know it's early, but it sounds like a perfect place for a little cliffhangers break. It's what I do.

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Don't explain everything to your brain explodes. Just chuck and job. That's stuff you should know. Word up, Jerry. All right. We're back. We don't have a definitive answer. unfortunately. But again, we have a lot of good ideas. As far as those three stages go,

they do get a little bit easier to pinpoint a rough timeline, but that foraging stage that we mentioned at first is that's definitely the hardest to kind of lock down in time. There is no archaeological record, basically, during that phase. Sure. But they do think, and again, this is people just giving their best guess. They do think that Australopithecines, the early humans, may have been. foraging around fires, and this is like four million-ish years ago? Yeah.

Yeah, for sure. I didn't see why they thought that, but like what the Australopithecus was doing that made them think that. But I don't know, maybe it had to do with their other behavior that made it seem like they would have done that. So the gathering phase, like I said, that dates back to about a million years ago, where it's very clear that humans have had a fire somewhere. That it's not possible that like a lightning strike set off a fire in the areas where we found evidence of human habitation and fire together, say 100 feet from the mouth of a cave. Very difficult for a wildfire to start there. So that's unambiguous is what they call it. Like evidence that humans were interacting or using fire, putting fire to some controlled use at that point.

But it's far from clear whether they actually started that and almost certainly did not a million years ago. Yeah, and that can also be a little tricky because sometimes they confuse stuff, stuff that might look like charcoal or ash, is some naturally occurring sediment from a cave. Yeah. So, you know, they tried to kind of parse through that stuff over the years. But they have found, you know, sites like there's one, and we're going to go through a few of these in a minute, but one called the Wonderwork Cave in South Africa. that they basically have agreed is probably the oldest site of controlled on-purpose fire use because they have found burnt bones there. And this is 100 feet into a cave.

Right. That's, again, unambiguous use of human fire. There's also some contenders for when we started like making fire ourselves, starting fires. And one's about 780,000 years ago. 400,000 years seems to be the generally accepted latest date that humans became capable in a widespread fashion of making fire ourselves. So somewhere between a million and 400,000 years ago, humans became capable of making fires, starting fires. And I say we talk about some of these different locations that are contenders for all this stuff. Well, yeah, there's the one in South Africa that I just mentioned.

They have found and been able to date ash from that cave to about a million years ago. But again, we're not positive that that was, you know, ignited by humans or not. And they don't know exactly how the fires were used in that case. But it gets a little better as we move along. The Qasim Cave in Israel was discovered about 26 years ago. And that is near Tel Aviv. and this is where they have found the first fireplace, basically, the first hearth that dates to about 300,000 years. So that's pretty unambiguous.

Yeah. And one of the reasons why they're like, yes, this is a pit, because up to that point when they find, like, use of fire, it's just, like, kind of spread out. Maybe one fire was held there. This is, like, layer after layer after layer of fires in the same place. So that's clearly a hearth. There's another one in Israel called Gesher Benat Yaakov. It's in northern Israel. And this is the one where they think that people were potentially starting fires as far back as 780,000 years ago.

And this would have been Homo erectus, who was the longest live hominin. They lived for almost two million years. And they were clever ones, too. They were the first ones to basically take a leap forward in stone tool technology. they also invented Jordash genes. And they know that the Homo erectus were the ones who were making, or at least using this fire 780,000 years ago, because they found their characteristic stone tools like hand axes.

And they were cooking fish essentially here on the banks of the Jordan River, carp that were up to like six and a half feet from what I read. And Chuck, I was reading about how they figured out that they were definitely cooking fish and that they weren't just like fish remains that they'd eaten raw and tossed into a fire. And they tested the fish teeth that had been cooked to see what temperature they'd been exposed to.

If there were a high temperature, they probably would have been remains just chucked into the middle of a fire. If they were exposed to a lower temperature, then this probably would have been a controlled roast. And they found the evidence for roasting. So they were cooking fish about 800,000 years ago there. Yeah, the next one is the Rising Star Cave

in South Africa. Africa, a very promising cave. And this one is a little controversial in that they do think that some sort of tiny brain species of early human. They were called the Homo Naledi. They think that they built fires in this cave. And this was about 335,000 years ago. But other people came along and said, no, I'm not sure if that's when it happened.

It might have been other people that came to that cave later. And the similar kind of goes for another cave in China. the Zucodian cave. That one was excavated in the 1920s, and people thought for a long, long time, that, like, hey, here's the oldest hearth, the oldest sort of purposeful fireplace, and it goes back a half a million years.

But it's kind of gone back in forth since in the 90s, 1990s, that is, they saw evidence of this ash there, and they said, you know, I don't think this is ash, actually. It was what Chuck will talk about later as other organic materials, looked like ash. But then later on in the 2010s, other people came back and had other evidence. They said, no, I think they were purpose-built fires here, which, you know, just goes to show

kind of how hard it is to really pinpoint this stuff. Right. Yeah, going back and forth between the 1920s and the 2010s like that, that's like archaeological whiplash. Yeah. So we really need to just kind of also point out here. We're talking about hominins using fires. not Homo sapiens. Homo sapiens obviously knew how to use fire and how to make fire, but we almost certainly were not the ones that came up with fire ourselves. We might have learned it, actually, from some of the other species of humans that were running around at the same time as we were, like Neanderthals.

And like I said, there was evidence of, like other species like Homo erectus, using fire to one degree or another, as far as. like maybe a million years ago. But there's a lot of questions about, did every single species of human know how to make fire? And Neanderthals, in particular, have been kind of picked on as not necessarily knowing what they were doing with starting fires. Yeah, this one has some pretty good arguments going, I think, in both directions.

They found evidences of activity in France and, like, sites in France that they excavated. Yeah. And they, you know, what they found was there were more traces of fire from periods without glaciers than periods that did have glaciers. And it doesn't really track in some ways because you would think that they would, if they could make fire on their own, then they would have done that when it was colder. And also it makes sense in a way because in the period where there aren't glaciers, there are going to be more lightning strikes and thunderstorms. And the vegetation is going to be dried out. and they may be, you know, using the fire, even in the warmer periods, because it's just there. Right, exactly.

They also find lots, or they have found in some Neanderthal sites, lots of ash build up. And not necessarily because this is a very ancient hearth, but because they had to keep the fire going. So it was constantly going because they didn't know how to get it started again if it went out. So, yeah, those are pretty good arguments for Neanderthals not being able to make fire. But there are other people who point to other evidence that says, like, no, actually Neanderthals knew what they were doing. One of them is that Neanderthals made birch bark pitch, which they used as basically an adhesive, like thousands of years before Homo sapiens were doing that. And they're also frequently found with manganese dioxide chunks, this black mineral. And it was usually interpreted as they were using.

this to like decorate their bodies or maybe even for cave art. Somebody has pointed out that, no, actually, manganese dioxide is a major component in fireworks and you could use it as a pretty good fire starter. So the jury's out, but for my money, they probably did know how to start fires because homo sapiens have a very, very long tradition of underestimating Neanderthals and being proven wrong in the end as the science advances. Yeah, for sure. And while we don't know, you know, when all the same.

this started. We definitely know the how, and it's kind of how modern humans start primitive fires, like without any sort of man-made tools. Percussion methods is, you know, when you're striking that flint off of, you know, each other, like off of a rock, it's going to spark. And, you know, maybe they saw that and thought, hey, that looks a little bit like lightning and gave it a shot. you've got the old fire drill method or any kind of friction method of rubbing something together really, really fast, and that'll get a fire going if you're good. Yeah, I've heard of both of those, obviously, but fire pistons I had not heard of. Essentially, you take a tube and a piston and put together, they essentially form an airtight,

well, coupling, I guess. You put a little bit of tinder, really, really dry, almost powdery or fibrous, like easily combustible material, right? And you put the piston in the tube and you press it really quickly, and that compression of air heats the air just enough that it can actually ignite that tender. Then you use the tender to catch more tender on fire, and now you've got a fire started. Like, when you look back at some of this stuff, I was watching a video of using bow drills to create fire. I looked, I was watching a really neat video, there's a YouTube channel called Make It Primitive, and they were making birch pitch with no pots. And when you look at this stuff, they're recreating that very, very ancient people figured out how to do.

It's like, how did anyone ever accidentally stumble upon this? Like, I understand we're looking at like the developed endpoint version of this, you know, primitive technology. but I can't even imagine how somebody figured out how to make birch pitch in the first place. What happened in some random fire somewhere that gave somebody the idea to turn that into making pitch? Yeah, I mean, I think it's kind of cool. Like, I don't know, maybe someone rubbed their hands together

and it got hot and they were like, huh, friction causes heat. And, you know, maybe a thousand years later, that idea became maybe a lot of friction could cause so much heat that something might actually catch on fire, then they start looking around on, like, a good way to do that. Like, that's how it had to have happened. I just think it's amazing. Yeah.

There was probably a transition period, though, where some poor Shmo's hands were bleeding. They rub them raw so much trying to start a fire with them before they moved on to wood. Yeah, I mean, what I think is amazing is that there's really nothing new on the scene, you know? Well, they say there's nothing new under the sun, Chuck. I guess so. Do you want to take our second break and come back and talk, I don't know, about the history of fire?

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homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The French Open is one of the toughest tests in tennis, and I know firsthand because I competed there myself. I'm Renee Stubbs, and on the Renee Stubbs Tennis podcast, I'm breaking down everything happening at Roland Garris. Every match, every upset, and what it really takes to win on clay. Jen Chinchin win. I mean, she went down in three to Rabakina, but I'm delighted. She's an outsider to win the French for me.

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How to take a perfect boop with all about fractals. Gang is con. A till of the hunt. The Lizzie board and murders and the cannibal runs. Going to explain everything to your brain explodes. Just chuck. And job you should know. Word up, Jerry.

So kind of at the outset, we were talking a little bit about how fire just changed humanity. And there's some specific things that we used it for that helped advance, like, different species, not just homo sapiens along. One is heat. Like, there's the pretty widely believed consensus is that we could not, and we did not move into colder climates, not just homo sapiens, but all hominins, until we had at least figured out how to move fire from one place to another without it going out, that we just would not have been able to survive in northern latitudes. Yeah. Without fire. So that was a huge thing. It allowed us to spread further and further away.

from the tropics. Yeah, for sure. And once you got out of the tropics, it allowed you to spread further and further wherever you were because it provided light. You could explore those caves. You could explore the darkness of the world around you. I know I've said this before about camping.

And, you know, when I go to the family camp, sometimes we'll take people that have aversions to camping. And we have some solar power there and string lights that light up the camp at night. And I have learned firsthand that what I think is going on when people say they don't like camping is that they don't like the darkness once you leave that campfire. Because people that say they don't like camping have had a great time at the family camp because it's lit up all around you. And they've said, man, I feel at ease here. And I'm never at ease in the woods.

I'm like, that's because you can see around you. It's the dark you're afraid of or whatever you think is in the dark. I feel like you're talking about Hodgman right now, aren't you? You know, Hodgman had a great time at the camp. Oh, I'm sure he did. Hodgman has a good time wherever he goes, but I can also, he's a city boy. Yeah. Yeah, I let him sleep in my little, my little camper, the little one-bed camper.

Yeah, we snuggled up. That is very sweet and completely unsurprising. Yeah, it was sweet. It was a good snug. And we also made tools, John and I did, with our fire, which is something that the early humans did. So I'm a real birch bark pitch fan now. Sounds like it, yeah. This is what it's for.

So it's a tarry adhesive that you make by basically burning and condensing birch bark. Okay. Which I love birch trees in the first place. Pando is almost a birch. It's a quaking aspen, but they're close. They're similar. I just love that bark. Yeah.

So if you just, again, go watch Make It Primitive. and the way that they make birch bark pitch. But you take this stuff, this tarry stuff, and you say, take an arrow. There's an arrowhead in your right hand. There's a shaft in your left hand. There's a string of twine in your teeth, because both of your other hands are occupied, and you wind the twine around the arrowhead to get it to stay on the shaft of the arrow. And then after it's on, nice and tight, then you put a bunch of pitch around it.

And man, it really holds it fast. Now you've got an arrow that's going to really do the job, all thanks to your birch bark pitch. Although, let's also give a hand for twine to you. You know, buddy, you are a hair's breath away from being a big fan of a loan, the show that I've touted for a decade. I don't know why you're not watching it, because all this stuff thrills you. Do they talk in it, though? Is their dialogue and narration? Because on Make it primitive, they just do their thing.

They don't talk. I mean, they put people alone in the woods with a camera, so they're, you know, they're talking some, but there's not, like, Mike Roe doesn't come on and say what Jane is doing is making an arrow. Gotcha. Yeah. Okay. Maybe I'll give it a shot. I don't know why I'm resistant to it either, Chuck. I think it's just reality television.

I have an aversion to it in general. Yeah. I mean, I guess it's reality. To me, reality TV, there's stuff like this and Top Chef. that are like real things, and then there's, you know, people, the shows where they just pit people against each other to argue and fight. Like, those are two different things. For sure.

For sure. Yeah, agreed, but yeah. So I think that's the only reason I'm just like not diving in feet first. Well, the real question is, do you prefer to cook your meat or smoke your meat? Do I have to choose? No, you don't. Well, there's a question, Chuck, about whether people started heating their meat, to cook it or to smoke it.

I'm a smoker. I'm on team smoker to put it in a Taylor Swift kind of way. As for what you prefer or what you think they were doing? What I think they were doing. I like smoked meat, but it is so bad for you that I just, I eat it sparingly. Yeah, same here.

So, yeah, I mean, the idea is that when they hunted a big, large megafauna, that they would have needed to do something with that meat, you know, there's too much meat to even cook and eat all at once, even if everyone's super hungry. Right. So it seems like smoking meat may have been the first thing. How they figure that out, I have no idea. It's all just conjecture. It just makes sense. Essentially, it's just from the size of the animal, no band of hunter-gatherers as far as the size that we thought or think they are. They couldn't

possibly have eaten like a woolly mammoth in one sitting. Yeah, but how do they know they didn't just like eat what they could and the rest went bad? Because humans have a long history of not being wasteful, and we still aren't today. I don't know. That's a great question, man. That's basically the argument against that. Well, maybe some of these sites, would they be able to tell if it was just bones or if it was, like, former meat? Yeah, there's the tool marks for, like, getting meat off of the bone.

There's teeth marks. All right. So there you go. Yeah, but that doesn't, yeah, I guess, yeah, if you looked at the whole. skeleton and there was just like one leg that was eaten and the rest of it was there. Yeah. I think, yeah, I'm not sure what team I'm on now. I'm in my confused era.

Well, we're both on Team Harth because I know we both enjoy good fire and the idea that people have been sort of really interacting with fire, I know we've said that some people say a million years, it really became widespread of around 400,000-ish years ago. Yeah. that's when we really can have some pretty good archaeological evidence that there are hearths all over the place. Yeah. People are building permanent setups or at least semi-permanent setups where they would live. And the hearth was a big, big part of that.

Oh, yeah, for sure. You wouldn't just use a hearth to, like, cook necessarily. There were different kinds of hearths that were designed to do different kinds of things. Like you would use the different hearth to fire, play pottery than you would maybe cook that one. leg of mastodon, you know? And then, yeah, you might have a different hearth for sitting around the campfire and socializing and taking shrooms. I wonder if you could cook in a kiln.

I don't know. That'd be interesting. It'd be like dry sous-vied. Yeah. So like you're kilning your or whatever, curing your pot, you might as well throw that turkey leg in there and double-dip. See what happens? Yeah.

I'll bet it would not look right. It might be fine taste-wise, but it. It would not look right. Yeah, Emily's getting into pottery. Maybe we'll see. I'll try it out. Oh, yeah, do you. Let me know how it goes.

I'll ruin her kiln. Yeah. She's going to be like, my kiln smells like turkey. Sorry. One of the things that I thought was pretty cool is that fire actually helped progress humans from age to age. It was the reason we transitioned from the stone age to the metal ages, starting with the copper age. We learned how to use fire to smelt copper in the. then we started creating better and better tools from there.

It was all thanks to fire. The whole thing, all of human prehistory swung on our use of fire right there. Yeah, for sure. And they've also got evidence that perhaps, well, not evidence, I guess, conjecture, again, that it has played a role in human biology. Right. Because humans have a gene mutation that we developed after fire, seemingly, that made us less sensitive to smoke inhalation.

Like, once fire started to be a thing, people would stand around it and start coughing and be like, well, this is no good, so they would stand back a little bit. But eventually the AHR gene, which helps us regulate our response to carcinogens and would smoke came along. That mutation came along in that gene.

So it's a pretty clear sign, I think. Yeah, and apparently it's just found in Homo sapiens. You can't find it in like Neanderthal DNA or Homo erectus. DNA. So it's like it just kind of goes to show you just how important fire is. Our bodies actually evolved to sit around fires better. Yeah. So we also learned to shout, I hate rabbits to get the smoke from coming your way. I wonder where that came from. I don't know. It makes zero sense. I bet someone knows. Another one, Chuck, that's, um, it, this makes sense, although I hadn't really

thought about it before, our circadian rhythms changed. Humans, as far as animals go, we're the most alert in the evening. Most animals are not the most alert in the evening. They're most alert earlier in the day. And the idea is that is because our interactions of fire allowed us to stay up much later. And hence our circadian rhythms changed and adjusted likewise. That's right. And then finally, that all sounds good when you're sitting around the fire talking about hunting the mastodon. But that also means if Tuk-Took is sick, Tuk-Took is getting other people sick. So ancient humans might have, spread disease a little more readily because people are just hanging out more.

Yeah, I was reading a study that they said that tuberculosis emerged in humanity about the same time we started using fire. Like being able to control it, not necessarily make it ourselves, but at least to move it around. And yeah, huddling together helps

a contagious disease spread much more easily because not only are you closer around a fire, you're also probably in like a rock shelter too. So tuberculosis loves fires and rock shelters. Everybody knows that. That's right. And by the way, I like Contagable.

I think I'm going to go with that from now on. Thank you. Thanks for that. I appreciate that, man. This is why you and I are so close. You're just supportive. What else you got, Chuck? I got nothing else.

All right. I don't have anything else either. That's the history of fire. That's everything there is to know about fire. so don't even try to look for more. And since I said that, obviously it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this follow-up to Gold Standard. Hey, guys, very much enjoyed the recent episode on the Gold Standard,

but I have a small correction. Warn-Wr-Wr-Wr. In the book, those Ruby slippers, and I guess they're talking about the Wizard of Oz, yes? Yeah, remember in the Gold Standard episode, we were talking about how it was an allegory for the debate over the gold standard and the Silver Standard and all that, and we're like, I guess the Ruby,

there was the Ruby standard and blah blah blah and this is what they're writing in about. So in the book, those ruby slippers were actually silver and were meant to represent the silver standard, not a ruby standard. There was a charged debate going on in the states at the time on whether we should use the gold or silver standard, which was the allegory you discussed in the episode. The movie changes silver slippers to ruby, I believe, to show off the new technicolor technology. Parenthetical, I'm no film buff, so please correct me if I'm mistaken. Hey, that sounds good to me, Liz. Yeah. Thank you guys for what you do.

I'm going to see you live in Akron. All right, Liz from Cleveland. Can't wait to see you there. And that is a great email. It is a great email. Thanks a lot, Liz. And Liz is among a handful of other people who wrote in to tell us that, which made the whole thing make way more sense.

So nuts to Hollywood and cheers to the original version of something. That's right. Ruby Standard. If you want to be like Liz and get in touch of us and tell us something we don't know, we love that kind of thing. You can send it in an email to Stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of IHeartRadio. For more podcasts, My Heart Radio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Get rewarded just for shopping with Simon Plus.

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This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and friends on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Dr. Maya Shunker, a cognitive scientist and hosts of the podcast, a slight change of plans.

a show about who we are and who we become when life makes other plans. I wish that I hadn't resisted for so long the need to change. We have to be willing to live with a kind of uncertainty that none of us likes. You can have opinions, you can have like a strong stance, and then there's your body having its own program. Listen to a slight change of plans on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.