Afaik man is the one animal who has been able to conquere his fear of fire and actually use it. This innovation, more than any other (again, afaik), allowed man to spread throughout the world. But…why man? What about us enabled us to put aside our fear and take that first step to reach out and take fire…and then learn how to make it and use it? Was it just luck? Simply an extension of man as tool user? If I’m wrong about fire and man being the only animal to use fire I would appreciate being set right on that score.
Is it merely fear that holds other animals back from using fire or something else? I’d think using fire – like most other tools – requires some degree of higher level thinking. Not many animals, to my knowledge, possess the mental capacity or physical dexterity to actually start or control fire.
WAG: When early man ate the meat and veggies that were roasted from forest fires, they (unlike other animals) had the mental capability to make the connection between the fire and tasty cooked food. The desire to reproduce that taste gave them incentive to overcome the fear of fire.
WAG: Animals think that fire is alive because it moves and they can smell it. Therefore they are afraid that it will attack them. Early man knew that fire was not alive. He may have had to observe it a while to be sure.
Also, innovations I’d put *way * ahead of fire:Language as well as spears, axes, harpoons, fishing hooks and other simple tools and everything you can do with those.
Afaik our ape cousins don’t (and didn’t) use fire. I’m unsure if even all the branches of hominid used fire.
Thats a debate in and of itself. IMHO man could never have moved into the more northern climes without fire…and maybe wouldn’t have survived the ice age. Certainly all those other things you discussed are important (though I think some of them are dependant on fire…spears for instance were usually fire hardened IIRC, many of the early clothes were smoked leather and boiled animal brains, etc)…but I think fire was key to mans expansion. Anyway, its certainly debate-able.
I just finished watching most of From Ape to Man on the History Channel–excellent program. The nutshell version they posit is that man walking upright was the key event in evolution–it freed the hands to develop tools, which in turn improved food supply because they could hack apart animals–eating protein improved development of the brain. Fire came after that–the program portrayed it simply as man overcoming an instinctive fear of fire–which allowed migration and survival. The development of “tribes” was also key because it meant humans could survive injury and illness.
First off let’s get away from this idea that animals fear fire. Most animals are no more wary of fire than is deserved, consideringthat it can be fatal and is often painful. Beyond those limits animals have no particular fear of it. It’s normal to see animals ranging from dogs to crows, hawks and lizards both hunting in front of and scavenging behind a fire front. They show caution but absolutely no fear of fire, and will happily pick animals literally pick of the flames. The same is true of herbivores, which will walk away form a small fire, or even step over it.
So humans aren’t unique in having no fear of fire. Where we are unique is in our ability to use tools and plan ahead. The use of fire of course requires both those abilities in spades, since the fire is a dangerous tool that needs to be judiciously applied and kept provisioned. It’s one of those things that requires a high degree of intelligence to even comprehend the usefulness of.
Really it’s like asking why other animals don’t steal unattended cars. After all a lion could run down far more zebra in a stolen 4x4 than she ever could on foot. But of course the tool in question is so complex that it requires advanced reasoning ability to comprehend that it even has any uses. Humans have those abilities, other animals don’t.
I’d have to contest the bolded statement, based as it is, upon the notion that only man uses tools. In fact, there are a number of creatures that utilize tools, from other primates to sea otters to octopus. These creatures don’t make tools, of course–they merely use what tool-shaped natural objects they find lying around–but tool making was a later result of the enlargement of the brain, which occured after hominids walked in erect position. I would contend that the upright posture permitted man (or more likely, woman ) to carry bulky loads such as extra meat or collected fruit for long distances, something that nonerect primates can’t do, and therefore permitted them to cross geographical regions where foraging was unlikely to provide sufficient sustanance.
All of the great apes live in “tribes” which, to some extend, serve to protect the weak (children) and infirm; this is not a hominid development.
Whether excess dietary protein stimulated the evolution of larger brains is an unresolved issue, but I find it somewhat unpersuasive; having a dense, easily obtained energy source may have allowed for the development of a larger brain (which uses about 1/5 of the marginal calorie intake of a human, primarily glucose) it does not follow that this caused the brain to become larger. It would have been more effective to give proto-Habilis stronger muscles or better endurance. The brain, with its seriously detrimental size (with regard to childberth complications), has to have had some other positive pressure selecting for it.
As for fire, the primary benefit of it (aside from warmth) is that it deters nocturnal predators. The value of fire for survival in northern climes is probably somewhat overstated, and the notion of cooking meat probably came well after the discovery of controlled fire; after all, how foolish would you be to throw good fresh raw meat into a hot flame to burn up? The cooking of grains and vegetables no doubt came much later than that, as they generally require fairly advanced pottery to stew.
We don’t know for sure, but it’s thought that Homo erectus was the first to use fire. Some say 1.5M years ago, so say .5M years ago. But I think we can safely assume that we used fire long before we knew how to make it ourselves. Since Neanderthals also used fire, we can be pretty sure that 3 species of hominids used fire (more, depending on how you divide up the Erectus into other species). 4 if you include Homo floresiensis. I don’t think there’s any evidence that Homo habilis (or rudolfensis) used fire. Ditto for any of the Australopithicines.
There are a lot of better shows on this subject that that one, but they didn’t make too many mistakes. Keep in mind that our Erectus left Africa at least 1.7M years ago (fossils found in the Republic of Georgia), and it’s quite likely they did not use fire at that time.
I’ve always thought that the difference between humans and other tool-using primates is that we make tools to make other tools. A fine distinction, perhaps, but one I like to draw.
The common theory is that competition drove our ancestors to work together in groups to gather resources. The brains of social creatures are generally much more complicated than those of solitary creatures. In the face of stiff competition for resources, cooperation and innovation (tool-using) would have served them very well. So the ability to innovate was probably highly developed by the time fire was “discovered”.
Well, yes. But they’re not chipping flint or notching bone. That’s a quanitative difference, I supposed, rather than a more definitive qualititative one, but a significant one nonetheless. I suppose you might say that they don’t use tools to make other tools, which requires a conceptual, rather than experiential, approach to tool making.
A large part of our brains appear to be evolved for language and complex social interaction, including an intuitive understanding of games theory or “constructive altruism”, i.e. sharing resources in return for future benefits. In order to develop that they had to have both a sense of time (will payback occur in memory), an ability to assess potential deception, and the ability to rally the tribe to enforce mutual agreements; all of these are seen to some marginal extent in chimps and orangutans (not sure about gorillas) but the development of language is necessary to make explicit contracts.
That being said, the American black bear (Ursus americans) and brown bear (Ursus horribilis) have similar brain weight to body weight ratios to the great apes (and by some estimations, roughly similar intelligence to the gorilla) and these animals are generally solitary, though they do engage in some social behaviors when clustered near a rich food source (salmon-spawning stream, garbage dump), though probably not as complex as primates living in tribal units. Language and the requisite brain development seems to have some significant aspect in natural selection, but it’s far from clear exactly how langauge abilities came to develop or why they’re worth the premium of an oversized brain.
I’m not sure that our earilest tool using ancestors were much different. Is smashing two stones together “using a tool to make another tool”? Depends on how you look at it.
Got a cite for that? I’ve never heard that before, and would be curious to read the details.
Well, I did say generally. This is a massive guess, but I would assume that ancestral bears were better able to defend themselves than small homonids. Solitary creatures don’t have to adapt/react to as many varied situations and stimuli. Homonids have difficulties in that they have relatively small teeth, no claws, and they can’t run as quickly as quadrupeds, so they have to respond to attacks and prey in innovative ways, whether climbing or throwing things, but most importantly, in cooperation (witness the defensive reaction of chimps). So their comparative weakness is offset by more brainpower.
The problem with that idea is that the one area where HGs never carry food with them is when crossing deserts, rainforest or other terrain devoid of food. They commonly carry water, but rarely if ever do they carry food.
And that makes perfect sense. Humans can carry food in our hands, but it is cumbersome, inefficient, attracts scavengers and means the hands can’t be used for carrying young or supporting ourselves if we stumble. Carried food also rots. Like other animals humans prefer to carry food in our gut and as fat reserves when travelling, leaving the hands free.
So the idea of carrying food to cross deserts doesn’t really make much sense. There is certainly an advantage in allowing foraging parties to split up and cover huge areas and then return to a pre-arranged base if they are successful, but that’s quite different form using the hands to carry provisions when travelling.
Orangs are great apes and don’t live in tribes. Males maintain solitary territories that overlap with several solitary or paired females. So it appears that this social concept is a development or our specific branch of great the apes, if not hominids specifically.
That’s a given. For a trait to develop it has to be selected for in some way. I don’t think anyon one has ever suggested that better food led to Lamarkian increase in brain size, even if a literal reading may have led you to conclude that.
Think of it as akin to saying migration north led to thicker fur in polar bears. That doesn’t mean that there is some Lamarkian mechanism at work, there had to be some other positive pressure selecting for denser fur.
Now that is a huge claim. Fire has a great many benefits from use as a weapon to a light source to an environmental management tool, but quite frankly I don’t believe that predator deterrence was of much importance at all.
See the problem here is that even chimpanzees without tools aren’t preyed on much anyway, and the more open the environment the less predation occurs. Savanna chimps are almost never the target of big cat attacks because in the open an animal that can throw rocks is not to be fucked with. Once you combine that with the great respect afforded humans by predatory animals it’s hard to imagine anything with the ability to use fire being preyed on to any significant degree. And if they were, fire wouldn’t be any deterrent.
Once again this seems to hinge on the myth that animals fear fire. Animals don’t fear fire. A cat will happily drag an injured animal out of the flames of a fire with its paw. A human asleep 6 feet away from a fire would be even less of a concern. Once a predator learned that the fire and the food item aren’t connected why would the simple presence of the flame be any deterrence at all? It can’t harm the predator.
I can see some value of the fire in allowing sentries to see predators, but that’s not deterring the predators, it’s simply using the fire as a light source. And the other problem is that I have never heard of people living in Africa or Asia amongst big cats ever bothering to post sentries. A cat that can stalk a gazelle in the noonday sun isn’t going to be troubled by a human in the dark.
And of course by the time people could use fire they had the toolkit and the wits to utilise thorns as a barrier, just as HGs did until very recently. Even a low barrier of thorn branches a foot high will physically prevent a lion from making an attack, which is more than can be said for a fire.
But why would anyone allow it to burn up? We are talking about cooking here. Even if the meat falls into the flame it can be easily recovered with a stick. Why would it be allowed to burn?
Far from there being no doubt that is one of the most dubious statements I have heard for some time. You do realise that HGs harvest, cook and consume grains even today without the use of pottery? And we know they have done so for the last 40, 00 years at least.
Whatever makes you think that grains and vegetables can only be cooked by stewing? All the earliest forms of cookery were simply baking or grilling. Essentially it consists of nothing more than throwing the food into the fire and dragging it out when you think it’s done. That works just as well for vegetables as it does for meat. If you want to get more creative you can bury material under the ashes and bake them or you can use hot stones as a frying surface. All those techniques are used by HGs today, and presumably have been ever since fire was discovered.
Grains and vegetables are, for the most part, indigestible to humans. The starch structure is simply to complex for our simplified gut. A human fed on unlimited quantities of raw barley and potatoes would starve to death in short order if she had to do even minimal exercise. Only by cooking do these foods become usable by humans, That fact alone suggests that people have always cooked tubers and grains, and that in fact it was the development of cooking that allowed us to exploit that food source in the first place. Prior to fire we were pretty much restricted to fruits and meat for our food.
Fire probably provided a hundredfold increase in the number of calories available to your average hominid tribe. That is not an insignificant advantage and has only been matched by one other technology: agriculture. It really hard to overstate just how beneficial cooking is to humans. It would probably be fair to say that it is the most important technology ever invented by our species.
My understanding is that man’s primary evolutionary advantage over other animals is that, as a species, he is the greatest generalist. As such, he can adapt to almost any environment and make the most extensive use of almost any resource. Man has lived everywhere from rain forests to deserts. His generalism is a great advantage over creatues who can’t come out of trees, or creatures who can’t climb trees. His ability to figure out how to search for and transport water gives him an advantage over animals who would die searching for water in the desert. The more specialized a species is, the less adaptable it is generally. Speaking of trees, man has even lived in trees. Amerigo Vespucci described whole villages of coastal Indians who built their homes in the trees. It is this same generalism that enabled man to use fire more resourcefully than other animals.
) to carry bulky loads such as extra meat or collected fruit for long distances, something that nonerect primates can’t do, and therefore permitted them to cross geographical regions where foraging was unlikely to provide sufficient sustanance.