The Ancient Greeks were right to have the story of how Prometheus brought fire to the human race front-and-center in their mythology. Fire is an amazing thing — most vertebrates flee from it when it happens in the natural world. But we humans learned to control it, and that revolutionized our existence.
The control of fire not only enabled the hominids who used it to settle about areas of the earth formerly shut to us because of climate reasons — it also changed us physiologically, or thus goes the arguments of a number of anthropologists. To contain fire allowed us to cook food — energy was saved in digestion, many foods such as tubers could be now consumed, and meat and other foods gave us far more calories cooked than they did when eaten raw.
And HERE’S a fun fact — some scientists trace the human taboo on eating placentas (placentas are common fodder for other primates) to the origins of cooking. Turns out, eating food cooked by fire causes an accumulation of toxins in the placenta, and we likely stopped eating ours once we mastered fire.
This line of evidence suggests to many that human brain size increased after our Promethean discovery, since our brains require more metabolic energy and grew along with our consumption of cooked foods. But we also might have driven this evolution with the socialization that controlled fires brought — we could stay active at night far longer, around a camp fire. And since we gathered together, we would have been using our social skills more, perhaps even fostering a niche for language.
Anthropologists don’t agree when humans first started using controlled fire. This is an image of Qesem Cave in Israel, which in the early 2000s scholars found convincing evidence of a continuously used fire pit dating between 420 and 200-thousand years ago. So Homo neanderthalis used fire. Many argue that a cave in South Africa called Wonderwerk shows intentional fire use from almost 2 million years ago, which would bring this technological revolution back to the Homo Erectus.
Sitting around a campfire has a long lineage indeed. 🔥
Sources: “Fire for a reason: barbeque at Middle Pleistocene Qesem Cave, Israel,” _Current Anthropology_ vol 58 no S16, Aug 2017, Ran Barking et al. _The Harvard Crimson_, “Cooked meat provides more energy,” Nov 9, 2011, Akua Abu, reporting on research by Rachel Carmody off of work by Richard W Wrangham. _Nature_, “Million-year-old ash hints at origins of cooking,” 02 April, 2012, Matt Kaplan. Sharon Young et al, ” The conspicuous absence of placenta consumption in human postpartum females: the fire hypothesis,” _Ecology of Food and Nutrition_, 51 (3), 198-217
