Fire use: The first signal of widespread cultural diffusion in human evolution
pnas.org
pnas.org
As a child, I surely enjoyed this story and would recommend it to anyone.
It made me realize just how much of everything I have and know is inherited, and why traditional cultures revere their elders so. Especially when the world changes as slow as it used to, your elder taught you everything that mattered, and everything that mattered was handed down across millennia.
People say our collective myths about dragons--flying fire breathing serpents--come from some ancient amalgamation of innate fear of large birds (which would have been predators to small mammals from which we evolved) combined with fear of snakes and other reptiles (same), and all with a healthy dash of the danger and power of fire.
We've been social animals living in (albeit small) social groups for 10s of millions of years with all sorts of accoutrements including functioning hierarchies, acting in ways suited to our environments, knowledge to be able to find food and raise young and so on.
For reference here, homo sapiens is from about 200kya, diverged from our closest relatives (chimps/bonobos) about 8000kya, and primates have been around for 80000kya. And that's just primates.
This stuff is crazy old, unfathomably old.
Or just dinosaur skeletons laying around and boys trying to impress
The only commonalities dragons seem to possess across cultures are being terrifyingly dangerous and at least vaguely reptilian (edit: and maybe flight but I'm not sure.) There's enough room in the margins to include a vast assortment of otherwise unrelated mythological beings and say "these are all dragons, these are all basically the same thing."
It follows the path of a group of Neanderthals in Paleolithic Europe (80,000 years ago), that try to tame fire, and their contact with homo-sapiens and other humanoid species.
It is outdated/inaccurate, given our today's knowledge, but We know The authors tried to do as much justice as they could, given the knowledge of the time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quest_for_Fire_(film)
It was one of those slow but very captivating movies of the era. Movies like this (both indy feel and very high quality), are just are not made anymore.
"Neanderthals possessed a modern vocal tract and were therefore capable of fully modern speech."
>lead us to hypothesize that at the latest by 400,000 y ago, hominin subpopulations encountered one another often enough and were sufficiently tolerant toward one another to transmit ideas and techniques over large regions within relatively short time periods.
The study suggests pretty "rosy" cultural diffusion. Would say capturing/kidnapping and forcing to divulge the secret qualify as sufficiently tolerant transmission of ideas? Imagine the smell of cooking meat coming from the other side of the valley while you're chewing on a piece of raw meat under the cold rain :)
I wonder can it instead of "transmission" be that the fire-capable just out-competed the rest and dominantly spread all over the place as a result.
Another possible interpretation is "genetic transmission" instead of "cultural transmission" like it is suggested for the stone tools here (while i don't agree with such hypothesis (pity as it leads to a lot of interesting conclusions, including ones about modern world), people do write scientific articles on it)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5066817/#:~:tex...
Lawrence Keeley's groundbreaking War Before Civilization offers a devastating rebuttal to such comfortable myths and debunks the notion that warfare was introduced to primitive societies through contact with civilization (an idea he denounces as "the pacification of the past").[1]
[1] https://www.amazon.com/War-Before-Civilization-Peaceful-Sava...
I'm not sure I'd frame it as most scholarly works getting this wrong. Almost all scholarship I've encountered in the last 25 years agrees with the position that both prehistoric warfare was common and that relationships between hunter gather societies often included violence. There is an open question of exactly how violent (extremely violent, frequently violent), but one would be hard pressed to find credible scholars arguing that mass violence was almost unheard of in pre-history.
Going all the way back to John Locke in the 18th Century and before that to Biblical understandings of pre-history there was a notion that past human arrangements were extremely violent. There was some trendy early and mid 20th Century scholarship that attempted to argue that mass violence was a disease of the civilized societies, but such arguments were, as far as I can tell, only fashionable because they rejected the assumed status-quo.
One argument against that is that transmission is much more frequent than replacement in human history. We have countless examples of technologies (agriculture and writing notably) being transmitted to different cultures, whereas the examples of cultures out-competing and replacing others through technology are rare.
Alexander the Great - phalanx with resulting spread of Greek culture over all the Middle East, Roman Empire - countless advantages over the cultures they dominated, Vikings - sea faring ships and navigation, Columbus+/Americas and the whole colonial period across the world, ...
Farmers moved in from the near East and replaced previous populations of hunters gatherers.
The Japanese adopting democracy after WWII was almost pure transmission; the population stayed basically the same.
The Holocaust was almost pure replacement; only a few people from mixed families survived in some areas.
But "something in between" is much more typical. Contemporary Iran is as much a heir to ancient Persia as it is to the Arab conquest and Islamization. Roman conquest of Britain led to a significant population admixture from the rest of the Empire and Romanization of local Celts at the same time. Expansion of Germans through Central and Eastern Europe in 12th-18th century was a thorough mix of replacement and transmission.