Can humans live without fire, tools, technology?

Factual Questions
41

Not very likely - fire and tool use both predate* H. sapiens and H. Neanderthal,*, originating with H. Erectus if not earlier. Our ancestors had fire and tools before they were human.

Tool use dates back to at least H. Habilis, even earlier than H. Erectus. Hell, it most likely dates back to the common ancestor of chimps and humans.

Um… that would be our ancestors before chimps and humans diverged. Actually, scratched that - pretty much any omnivorous animal could be described as a “hunter-gatherer”.

Nope. At least, not our closest relatives.

Um… chimpanzees have been observed in the wild actively hunting, killing, and eating monkeys. In addition to eating insects.

“Stone age tools”, again, go back to before humans were human. Before the species could even be part of the genus Homo. There are not and never have been humans without tools.

We’d be handicapped by being considerably weaker than our closest ape cousins. But yeah, we might be able to survive for a time. I don’t we could do it long term, our young are too vulnerable, keeping ourselves fed would be difficult. We evolved as tool users. Not just H. sapiens but about 3 million or more years of evolution through at least a half dozen species, all of them tool users. “Uses tools” is as much a defining trait of H. sapiens as “uses language” and “is a biped”.

I don’t know the formal name, but “common ancestor prior to the split to chimps, gorillas, and humans”. Chimps use tools, even make tools by modifying branches to shapes better suited for things like termite-fishing.

Some foods are toxic if not cooking. Cooking obviously makes them a food source that would be otherwise unavailable.

Cooking can soften fibers and alter the chemistry of a food, allowing for easier digestion, resulting in greater net calories.

42

Olduvai gorge is my cite - both for the environment (it did fluctuate between drier and wetter, especially at the start of actual Homo evolution, but it was never an “extensive tropical rainforest” - more like a gallery forest - and the drier type of environment is the most persistent, while hominid occupation was relatively continuous i.e. not tied to wetter periods.) and the not being strict vegans thing.

43

This thread has brought me a better understanding of what it means to be human. Thanks for all of the input.

44

Unlikely. The genus Homo is generally accepted to have emerged about 2.5M years ago, and those ancestors (usually called H. habilis) almost certainly did NOT control fire.

45

Which blows my mind. By coincidence I’ve been watching a lot of Survivor lately. These are relatively intelligent people who know they are going to need fire going in. Accordingly, some players have studied up on how to make fire with friction (books and YouTube). Yet armed with the “how to” knowledge they fail way more often than not. AND they are armed with knowledge much more important (which early man was not) - namely that it’s possible in the first place. It’s one thing to rub two sticks together for an hour knowing that fire is a possibility, it’s quite another to do it without that information.

46

Leaving aside a few foods that have to be cooked to be safe, many roots have to have their cell walls destroyed before getting any food value from them. Potatoes are notably essentially calorie-free when raw, though as a new world food that wouldn’t have played a roll in human evolution. Raw carrots have very few calories also. We are not adapted to get much from raw leaves. Animals that live on raw vegetation masticate their food forever. There is a very interesting book on the subject called “Catching Fire” by Richard Wrangham. See Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human - Wikipedia for a description of the book.

Wrangham does discuss the question of how long homo species have used fire. There is good evidence going back a million years (long before H. sap) and I have recently read about a dig turning up evidence up to two million.

[speculation] I assume that early use of fire was fortuitous: Oh here is a fire and the animals trapped in it taste just divine. Then people figured out how to preserve fire. Smoldering embers and all that. Deliberately making fire probably came late. Some noticed that rubbing two sticks together made them warm and also left small pile of sawdust. Still, it is a slow and painstaking project. At some point, an apparatus called a bow drill was invented. Take a log, make a depression in it, place a pointed stick into the depression and use the apparatus to turn the stick quickly. The point of the stick wears down to sawdust which stays in the depression and heats. After a while it will start to smoke and you carefully blow on to encourage the fire. But not too soon. See https://www.google.ca/search?q=bow+drill+fire+making&biw=1024&bih=564&tbm=isch&imgil=GIEEaUF1v7PjLM%253A%253BQiUQEwmTMJ9qOM%253Bhttp%25253A%25252F%25252Fwww.simplesurvival.net%25252Fillustrations%25252Fbow_and_drill.htm&source=iu&pf=m&fir=GIEEaUF1v7PjLM%253A%252CQiUQEwmTMJ9qOM%252C_&usg=__dMecLAePjegLgH4lOsKa4x5kmwI%3D&ved=0CCgQyjdqFQoTCIiLts7N9sYCFcbQgAod0XoHsg&ei=bayzVcigLcahgwTR9Z2QCw#imgrc=GIEEaUF1v7PjLM%3A&usg=__dMecLAePjegLgH4lOsKa4x5kmwI%3D

47

A slight digression … I guess flint and steel was the default method of making fire for a few thousand years? I’ve never seen people on reality shows scoop a flint out of the ground and use it (although it’s probably happened). Where did your average desperately poor medieval peasant get a flint and steel? Did they actually have them, or was a fire going out the kind of calamity that required rubbing sticks together for a couple of hours?

48

Everything quoted there is factually incorrect.

Nit-pick. You’re using the older definition of “hominid”, I think. Used to be that meant us and our ancestors after we split off from the chimp line. Now that term means all the great apes. The term that is general used now to describe us and our ancestors back until the point where we split from the chimp line is “hominin”.

49

Most people would have flint and steel if they had a house, but still; if the neighbors weren’t too far, it could be quicker to bum a pair of embers from the neighbors. Usually the fire wasn’t kept burning all night, anyway, it would be allowed to bank down and then get revived in the morning.

This story is from family, in theory it should be verifiable but I don’t have the means here: fire used to be one of the four things which our laws (Navarre) considered “undeniable as necessary to life”. The laws also regulated how much had to be given. In the case of fire, the minimal requirement was “the person asking will place cold ash in their cupped hand, and carry only as many embers as they can take in that hand without getting burned.” That doesn’t mean the giver couldn’t say “grab a torch”, but that they weren’t required to give more than the minimum needed to start a fire.
The other three things were water, salt and a path to one’s lands (whether property or a common-land allotment). The only one of these four which remains in current laws is derecho de paso, the path to one’s lands.

50

Indefinitely or for a short period of time? If indefinitely I’d say no. I can’t imagine any thing a human does for survival that requires no tools at all.

Clothes, of course, are tools as well. And we can’t really live without them at all indefinitely, no matter where we are. Even in the most optimal environment and in the most primitive societies some environmental protection is used. We can’t go completely naked with zero clothes for ever in any environment. And we need other tools for everything we do, even if the tool is just a rock to help dig out a root or a basket to put stuff in.

Are we pretending that food is also so abundant and easy to gather that our theoretical tool free humans simply have to open their mouths to take it in? That’s it’s available always, in every season and is disease free? Is the water without organic components harmful to humans? Is the weather warm, but not too hot, sunny, but with plenty of shade, and so mild and calm that humans never need to shelter (which is also a tool)? If so, then I suppose humans could live fairly long, until they started having kids and needed something tool like for those babies, where we’d probably run into some issues.

Well, that would certainly be an issue. I guess we’d go complete vegetarian, and only gather those plants that are easy to harvest and don’t need to be stored or preserved…and then a lot of humans would die anyway due to food born pathogens in plants that are eaten raw.

Our closest primate cousins use tools though. They also have pretty formidable physical traits we don’t have. They are hairier for one thing (protection from the elements, even the sun). They are stronger and tougher. And even THEY use tools. They build nests and other shelter, they use sticks and such to help them get at more difficult food sources, they use rocks to smash stuff, etc.

Humans, of course, are far more specialized at this point. We have been tool users since long before we WERE humans. Our ancestors were tool users, and so where their ancestors and so were theirs…back well over 2 million years at this point. Taking away, completely, or tools would wipe us out over long periods of time. You COULD do it for short periods of time, but watch Naked and Afraid sometime to see how well that works out…and those people generally have at least some survival type training AND they aren’t restricted from making tools (which every one of them does, first thing) or using fire. And generally it doesn’t work out well for them, even though we are only talking 21 days. :stuck_out_tongue:

51

If you dropped naked human beings into a pristine environment, the first thing they’d do is start making tools. The simplest tool of all is a stick that you can use as a club, for digging, for knocking down plants, for throwing, and so on. The next simplest tool is a rock that you can use for throwing, as a club, as a hammer, as a grindstone, and so on. The next simplest tool is a broken rock with a sharp edge that you can use as a chopper.

How do you prevent naked human beings from picking up sticks and rocks and using them as tools? Human beings have used sticks and rocks as tools going back to when human beings and chimpanzees were the same species. If you have a team of alien space bats constantly observing their research project, watching with phasers set on stun who shoot any person who picks up a stick or a rock I guess you could do it.

52

Steel came along relatively late.

Iron pyrite, and material from iron-nickel meteorites might work, but the supplies were highly localized. Needless to say, either one would have been a valuable trade object probably were traded far and wide, just as flint and obsidian suited to knapping were traded extensively.

Fire going out for most of human history was a pretty serious thing - hence the importance of hearths and hearth-gods, tending of special flames by vestal virgins, etc.

The keeping of smoldering embers was the usual method for retaining/restarting a fire.

53

Actually, I have heard (no cite; just a few things I read some time ago) that when the going was good (eg spring/summer) and food sources were adequate, hunter-gatherers didn’t spend all that much time ‘working’. Maybe three or four hours a day would be enough to hunt/gather enough food to feed the group. Not saying it was an easy life, but maybe not as much of a struggle as you may think.

Of course, when the going isn’t good, when it’s winter and there’s very little to eat, then yes, prepare to work long and hard with very little to show for it!

Agriculture, on the other hand, starting from scratch with only basic tools and little understanding of domestication of animals and plants, would have been an enormous amount of work and a massive investment of time and energy (and risk) for comparatively little payoff. There are many theories out there as to why agriculture became a thing, but it would seem to be from necessity rather than desire.

54

To be clear, banking a fire is far from letting it die. It is the careful preservation of the fire by covering the burning coals with an insulating, but porous, layer of ash so they continue to smolder. In the morning you clear the ashes, add some fuel, and blow on it a bit.

55

Having spent quite a bit of time in the woods using only Stone Age tech I’d like to flesh out a couple of things already discussed above. First off, pre-flint and steel (that is, 99 % of fire-using history) various friction fire methods were the most common way to make fire. Flint and pyrite work and were used mostly wherever the latter part of the kit could be found, but the vast majority of habitable regions in the world do not. Hence the friction methods that depend on bits of woody plants, carefully selected and prepared, but globally available and easy to shape with the meagrest blade, anyway.

A fire going out was not a ‘pretty serious thing’ for most of humanity. Many a cold, damp morn in the Boreal forest have I reached for the fire sticks to rub an ember out since I didn’t feel the need to bank the previous night’s fire. From the cold start to a flame it takes around one minute, by the way. On other occasions (downpour etc.) I have put a little effort into keeping an old ember alive in the fireplace. Easy. Never have I gone cold due to lack of fire.

Various fire bundles were a widespread solution to traveling with fire, basically layered bunches of flammable materials with restricted but existent airflow. I haven’t needed them yet. A hand drill set and a bunch of dry kindling plus some ember extender (polypore fungus etc.) have me all set even for winter excursions, fire made on the spot when needed.

On to the working hours of hunter-gatherers: in the 60’s it was concluded that hunter-gatherers indeed need only a couple of hours a day to feed themselves. Later this was challenged and shown erroneous, as it is not only the time needed to gather food that’s work for h-gs - maintaining and replacing the tech to feed the band (arrows, spears, fish traps, carrying bags etc. etc.) takes several hours per day, on average. Add to this the often serious task of procuring clothing and masses of firewood in cool / cold environments / seasons, and the hunter-gatherer work day averages out at around 8 hours, or the same as us modern folk. Of course, subsistence farmers don’t get by with 8 hours, they need more like 12 to keep things going. And still face a bigger risk of famine than hunter-gatherers, who nevertheless know well what it feels like to go hungry.

56

No, I mean it in the Great Ape sense.

57

Toxylon, you use a hand drill, not a bow drill? Less to carry, but with my dainty, civilized hands I got blisters before I got a fire.

58

OK, then in that case I’d say: Probably not, but we really don’t know. It’s almost certain that our common ancestor with the chimp was a tool user, but he would also have been a hominid. Since the lesser apes are not tool users, it’s quite likely that our pre-great ape ancestors were not.

I know you are well read on the subject, so I’d be interested in hearing why you think it likely.

59

Very slight nit-pick, they are not tool makers. They do occasionally use tools as do many other animals.

60

Counter-nit: It’s not real clear where tool-using shades into tool-making. e.g.

Pick up any stick on the forest floor, regardless of how well-shaped it is for the task at hand.
Carefully select the best-shaped stick nearby for the task at hand.
Break some twigs off that best-shaped stick.
Break a stick off a tree.
Break a stick off a tree and clean off the twigs.
Break a stick off a tree, clean off the twigs, and sharpen the end.
…
Break a stick off a tree, clean off the twigs, fork the end. Knap a flint. Tie it to the forked stick with vine.
It’s pretty clear those end-points are tool-using and tool-making respectively. Hard to say where the boundary is. They’re all conceptually about the same thing: Thinking of a state different from the current state and taking positive actions to transform the current state into the desired state.