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Why Fire Makes Us Human

smithsonianmag.com

92 pointsonuralp18 comments

I once came across a curious anthropological account of the importance of fire is a section in Feliks Koneczny's book "On the Plurality of Civilizations"[0] written in the 1930s. (The OCR or transcription isn't great, but the text is still able to be read.) Others might find it interesting.

[0] https://www.scribd.com/doc/4464979/ON-THE-PLURALITY-OF-CIVIL...

From, uh, 2013.

And the book, Catching Fire, mentioned in the article and from which most of the info is gleaned is from 2010. The scholar in the article, Richard Wrangham, wrote the book.

Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari doesn't push the domestication of fire as far back as 1.8 million years as Wrangham does but it does note that the chimpanzee brain uses 6% of the body's energy at rest, while according to the article "A human body at rest devotes roughly one-fifth of its energy to the brain". The hypothesis is that only cooking could have provided this boost. Shorter gut, bigger brain. It's a fascinating conjecture. The question is, did we develop sophisticated language before domesticating fire or vice-versa. Perhaps the synthesised creation myths of all the world's cultures and religions could provide a clue?

Regarding the timescale this is about, what does it matter that the article is 5 years old?

Only that normally we put the year in the title of the post like this (2013) so that people know it's a few years old. That's all, not that the info is out of date or anything.

Which is useful if, like me, you guessed whose work this was going to be about (I took an anthro class in college with one of his former grad students) and hoped it would be a follow-up, not the same book.

I loved this article. Stories like this make me feel a weirdly intense connection with everyone. One thing we can all have in common is our evolutionary history and how it made us the beings we are, flaws and all.

It makes you wonder why humans are so much more special than every other species. In only a few hundred thousand years we evolved far beyond a threshold that no species has managed to achieve in the years, and for some, eons of evolution proceeding.

Loren Eiseley also focused on the anthropology of fire. This is from the 1950's:

https://carrieshmarrie.weebly.com/blog/man-the-firemaker-by-...

also the same thing in a Google Books link: https://books.google.com/books?id=Bg2-Clxqy88C&lpg=PA45&ots=...

Fermentation is another naturally-occurring thing that has been used by humans to prepare food since forever. I think it is myopic to focus on fire.

Fire substantially predates fermentation, though. We were already benefiting from fire-cooked food long before the rise of conscious fermentation.

Besides that, fermentation at scale, for pickling, beer, or bread, requires containers - which are a product of ceramics, which is a product of fire. Fermentation as a humanity-changing technology is inseparable from fire that way.

Meats can be fermented whole without containers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosciutto

Ceramics? People have fermented food in seal skin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiviak

The Mesa-verde mesolithic culture used a fabric-based container before they discovered ceramics. They could even cook food with them.

I'm currently reading Why We Sleep and just finished a chapter on how humans' ancestors came out of the trees and started sleeping on the ground. It's speculated that early humans' use of fire made this non-suicidal - keeping away the big nocturnal predators and also reducing the number of ticks, etc, preying on them.

Tangential, but I've also heard that humans are the only animal that will willingly run towards a fire.

Some insects are attracted to flames:

https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129035...

Gah! Forgot about those. Maybe because I hate them. I'm sure there was some type of cognitive bias at play.

Cooking helped us to fuel our large brains. May we turn it around and ask: for a given diet and brain size, is the adaptive value of curiosity/creativity to save on calories? Not just by improving our plans, tools and behaviours but by making thinking itself more efficient (in terms of simple wattage).

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