# Length of time humans had fire before cooking? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [July 14, 2014, 1:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/length-of-time-humans-had-fire-before-cooking/693067 "2014-07-14T13:01:02Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 14\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Learjeff](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/94ad74/32.png) [@Learjeff](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Learjeff)\ **Post date:** [July 15, 2014, 6:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/length-of-time-humans-had-fire-before-cooking/693067/21 "2014-07-15T18:50:08Z")
> [@Xema](#): > > Seems weak. > > Humans with artificially hairy bodies (aka clothing) often sit around fires. How often does one actually catch fire, to the extent that he/she would be removed from the gene pool? Clothing has flame retardants. How many people sit around a fire every day? How many of them are cooking in the fire, without metalware? How many are dealing with wood of all shapes and sizes, due to the effort of chopping it with stone tools? (I’ve done a fair amount of the latter. It makes for a fire that’s a lot easier to cause problems!) But yes, it’s a tenuous claim, one that would be hard to corroborate. If we had evidence of hairiness in the fossil record that would help, and if it correlated to harnessing fire that would be a good argument but still wouldn’t confirm it (and as I said above, we don’t have much evidence about the use of fire earlier than 250KYA and we don’t know whether the lack of evidence is significant). The currently more popular theory is sexual selection, IIRC. Other theories involve heat exchange, bipedalism, and emerging from forests to live on the savanna. If it was just the fire thing, we’d have hairless arms and hairier chests. I’m the other way around, so there’s one data point against my hypothesis! ---
**Author:** ![Learjeff](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/94ad74/32.png) [@Learjeff](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Learjeff)\ **Post date:** [July 15, 2014, 7:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/length-of-time-humans-had-fire-before-cooking/693067/22 "2014-07-15T19:05:04Z")
> [@md2000](#): > > There’s the theory that as human ancestors dropped out of the trees and started foraging the plains around the forest, they also started scavenging the abandon carcasses of big game. Thus, they developed a digestive system for aged, softened meat; cooking simulates this breakdown rather well, so they simultaneously found soft meat and cooking, adding a good source of protein to their diet. They then went on to learn to hunt and kill their own meals. Right. Furthermore, it’s likely that meat was a large part of our diets before our brains grew dramatically, since big brains require so many calories. > [@](#): > > The interesting question to me - humans developed agriculture, somewhere around 10,000 years ago in several locations suited for it. The migrants to North America came from Siberia and that general area about 14,000-plus years ago, and presumably took quite a few generations to get out of the ice fields and find areas conducive to agriculture. they apparently came from a nomadic culture, probably no exposure to or tradition of agriculture. So a bunch of random hunter-gatherers developed agriculture fairly quickly once they found the right location. However the earlier humans -say 20,000 or 50,000 years ago - lived in ideal conditions across Africa and Eurasia for 40,000 to 60,000 years, and still only developed agriculture 10,000 or so years ago. Why? Jared Diamond’s main answer to this was the climate, which continuously varied dramatically, up until the very unusually stable Holocene period which started … 10,000 years ago! But still, only the Fertile Crescent started that long ago. Other sites developed agriculture as recently as 4 KYA (again, according to Diamond, if memory serves). My guess is that we had frequent stabs at ag, but it didn’t catch on and continue until the Holocene. Again, a story I think I’m borrowing from Diamond, it starts with people collecting some kind of edible plants and bringing them back to a (mobile) village for processing. Especially in the case of grains, lots of seeds get dropped in the processing, so next year (when the tribe returns) they find “crops” growing where they’d processed it, more dense than where they’d collected it earlier. This can continue for some time but eventually they figure out that it’s the dropped seeds that make the next year’s crops. The big step isn’t this part. The big step is abandoning the mobile lifestyle and staying put, to protect the planted crops. That changes pretty much everything. But no doubt even that change was gradual. In any case, it’s easy to hypothesize this kind of thing happening many times, but not lasting long enough to reach the agricultural society stage due to changing climate. What we have evidence for is the societies, more than the primitive agriculture itself. It seems to me that various American Indian tribes used a mixture of hunter-gatherer and agrarian lifestyles, and I wonder how much evidence this would leave, more than 10 KYA later. Of course they had much more advanced toolkits, which would have left evidence, but without that? ---
**Author:** ![snowthx](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/snowthx/32/10660_2.png) [@snowthx](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/snowthx)\ **Post date:** [July 15, 2014, 7:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/length-of-time-humans-had-fire-before-cooking/693067/23 "2014-07-15T19:18:14Z")
> [@md2000](#): > > The interesting question to me - humans developed agriculture, somewhere around 10,000 years ago in several locations suited for it. The migrants to North America came from Siberia and that general area about 14,000-plus years ago, and presumably took quite a few generations to get out of the ice fields and find areas conducive to agriculture. they apparently came from a nomadic culture, probably no exposure to or tradition of agriculture. So a bunch of random hunter-gatherers developed agriculture fairly quickly once they found the right location. However the earlier humans -say 20,000 or 50,000 years ago - lived in ideal conditions across Africa and Eurasia for 40,000 to 60,000 years, and still only developed agriculture 10,000 or so years ago. Why? It has been theorized that humans went thru a severe genetic bottleneck about 70,000 years ago ([Toba event](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory)). If true, then all populations after that point essentially have the same starting point, no matter where they were. Pair the bottleneck up with the most recent [Ice Age](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_glaciation)(12,000 to about 100,000 years ago), and you have a few more constraints on the real estate they may have inhabited. My speculation is that only after the most recent ice age ended did human populations spread out to the areas you mentioned to start the development of agriculture. Perhaps until then the areas were less than ideal to start that process. ---
**Author:** ![md2000](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/73ab20/32.png) [@md2000](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/md2000)\ **Post date:** [July 15, 2014, 7:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/length-of-time-humans-had-fire-before-cooking/693067/24 "2014-07-15T19:22:45Z")
It’s not hard to see someone abandoning a pile of seeds in a puddle of water or spitting out the orange seeds or some such, and noticing a few days later they are starting to germinate. They may have been cavemen, but they weren’t stupid and they had plenty of time to observe the circle of life around them. I agree, they probably realized what plants were, were they came from, and deliberately began planting next season’s food for their return long before they settled into one place to enjoy the benefits. For one thing, to settle down you need foo storage techniques, for another, you need to be replanting on a massive scale compared to “let’s toss the extra handfuls out there and collect them next fall”. how many acres would of field area need to be planted to support a tribe of 20 or 30 individuals? How many bushels of surplus grass seed? ---
**Author:** ![md2000](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/73ab20/32.png) [@md2000](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/md2000)\ **Post date:** [July 15, 2014, 7:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/length-of-time-humans-had-fire-before-cooking/693067/25 "2014-07-15T19:29:59Z")
I’ve heard of the 70,000 year-old bottleneck. But, by 50,000 years ago hey had spread as far as Australia. Presumably the Nile, the Indus, Mesopotamia, and China were not as hostile as ice-covered North America. As we see in Mexico, it did not take that long for locals to identify a useful food plant and develop it to an incredible useful crop (corn) or the ancillary crops like beans, potatoes, etc. Just how variable was the 40,000 year old climate? there wasn’t a 5,000-year flat period where crops could be developed? It’s an interesting puzzle. one possibility is that the nomadic, warrior-hunter lifestyle developed the cunning brain that could understand enough to handle agriculture… a process only finished about 20,000 years ago. ---
**Author:** ![Der\_Trihs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/der_trihs/32/233_2.png) [@Der\_Trihs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Der_Trihs)\ **Post date:** [July 15, 2014, 7:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/length-of-time-humans-had-fire-before-cooking/693067/26 "2014-07-15T19:43:06Z")
> [@Broomstick](#): > > If the tribes referred to were the Aboriginal Tasmanians there is now archaeological evidence that a long time ago they did, in fact, know how to fish based on things like hooks. At some point they _lost_ the technology, it’s not that they never had it. > > A possible reason for that is periodic blooms of microscopic ocean life that are either directly toxic to fish, or allow toxins to build up in fish to the point they become toxic to people. Apparently the seas around Tasmania suffer from this a bit more often than other places on the planet. If the hypothetical tribe has no reliable way to distinguish toxic from non-toxic fish then eating fish becomes roulette and abandoning seafood starts to make a lot of sense, particularly if there is sufficient land-based food to keep everyone fed. > > There is also a hypothesis that some catastrophe killed off a large number of Tasmanians in the past, enough that survival was extremely precarious for awhile even by hunter-gatherer standards and some cultural knowledge was lost, resulting in a technological bottleneck and the most primitive material culture known in historical times. Being isolated from the rest of the world, they could not benefit from outsiders re-teaching them certain techniques. It wouldn’t even take a major disaster; just accidents and time. Small, isolated, pre-literate cultures naturally lose knowledge because all it takes is a random accident to kill off the few people who know it; and the smaller they are, the more prone to losing knowledge they are. In this case for example if the few people who know how to make fishhooks die before they can teach anyone else, the tribe loses the knowledge. And in just a few generations they lose the knowledge that such things are even possible, much less how to use them. ---
**Author:** ![Timetrvlr](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/53a042/32.png) [@Timetrvlr](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Timetrvlr)\ **Post date:** [July 15, 2014, 7:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/length-of-time-humans-had-fire-before-cooking/693067/27 "2014-07-15T19:53:52Z")
> [@snowthx](#): > > Speculation on my part - I would guess that cooked meat was discovered thru scavenging following a brush-fire, possibly caused by lightning, that trapped, killed, and partially/fully cooked a few animals. I could imagine the benefits of cooked meat perhaps lead early people to _ **want** _ to capture and control fire. I believe you are right. brush fires/grass fires are common in Africa. No doubt very early man discovered it’s usefulness and found ways to tame it. They must have observed that cooking food makes it more palatable and easier to eat. They must also have observed that other animals were afraid of fire and then used fire to protect their camps. ---
**Author:** ![Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spectre_of_pithecanthropus/32/12343_2.png) [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus)\ **Post date:** [July 16, 2014, 6:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/length-of-time-humans-had-fire-before-cooking/693067/28 "2014-07-16T18:11:24Z")
> [@running\_coach](#): > > [Look what Zog do!](http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_rtEfGneubno/TSZo9abFbPI/AAAAAAAAABY/ZkLv-FFXN4w/s1600/GaryLarson_2001.jpg) Love the caveman ones! Whoever publishes these now should put out an entire book of Far Side caveman cartoons. ---
**Author:** ![Hari\_Seldon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hari_seldon/32/5173_2.png) [@Hari\_Seldon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hari_Seldon)\ **Post date:** [July 16, 2014, 7:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/length-of-time-humans-had-fire-before-cooking/693067/29 "2014-07-16T19:38:13Z")
I said upthread that there was some evidence of cooking from a million years ago. It is discussed here: [http://discovermagazine.com/2013/may/09-archaeologists-find-earliest-evidence-of-humans-cooking-with-fire](http://discovermagazine.com/2013/may/09-archaeologists-find-earliest-evidence-of-humans-cooking-with-fire) and they are going back to dig deeper. They know this cave was occupied 2 million years ago (as recently as 1900) so they may find something. And since hominins were confined to Africa that long ago, the knowledge of cooking might have spread throughout the continent. ---
**Author:** ![Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spectre_of_pithecanthropus/32/12343_2.png) [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus)\ **Post date:** [August 1, 2014, 7:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/length-of-time-humans-had-fire-before-cooking/693067/30 "2014-08-01T19:38:35Z")
Probably longer than we had luggage without wheels. …but not by much. ---
**Author:** ![njtt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/ecd19e/32.png) [@njtt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/njtt)\ **Post date:** [August 2, 2014, 1:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/length-of-time-humans-had-fire-before-cooking/693067/31 "2014-08-02T01:34:45Z")
> [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](#): > > Probably longer than we had luggage without wheels. > > …but not by much. Well, if anyone here would actually know, I suppose it would be you. 😃 ---
**Author:** ![Toxylon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/f05b48/32.png) [@Toxylon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Toxylon)\ **Post date:** [August 3, 2014, 11:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/length-of-time-humans-had-fire-before-cooking/693067/32 "2014-08-03T11:00:07Z")
> [@Broomstick](#): > > The Tasmanians had also lost the knowledge of how to _make_ fire - they certainly used it, but were utterly dependent on either keeping the tribe’s fire going, finding a natural source of fire, or obtaining fires from their neighbors if the group’s fire went out. As perennially fascinating as it sounds (they didn’t know how to make _fire_!!!), the Tasmanians’ lack of fire-making skill is [most likely a huge myth](http://press.anu.edu.au/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/ch0155.pdf) (PDF). (Based on an early eyewitness account of a group of Aborigines being unable to start a fire _in the rain_, widespread use of fire-keeping methods, and the cultural reluctance of revealing sacred fire-making methods to Europeans. Eyewitness accounts of Tasmanian fire-making, as well as extant Tasmanian fire-making apparatus counter the well-established claim). ---
**Author:** ![Learjeff](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/94ad74/32.png) [@Learjeff](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Learjeff)\ **Post date:** [August 4, 2014, 7:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/length-of-time-humans-had-fire-before-cooking/693067/33 "2014-08-04T19:50:53Z")
> [@md2000](#): > > I’ve heard of the 70,000 year-old bottleneck. But, by 50,000 years ago hey had spread as far as Australia. Presumably the Nile, the Indus, Mesopotamia, and China were not as hostile as ice-covered North America. As we see in Mexico, it did not take that long for locals to identify a useful food plant and develop it to an incredible useful crop (corn) or the ancillary crops like beans, potatoes, etc. Just how variable was the 40,000 year old climate? there wasn’t a 5,000-year flat period where crops could be developed? According to the graph in Diamond’s book, no. Hardly even a 2K year period, IIRC. The Holocene jumps out as a dramatic pause in a wildly swinging temperature plot. First, even if there were 5Ky periods that might have lasted long enough for ecosystems to stabilize and for human cultures to begin to develop agriculture, would they have had time to develop into stable communities long enough to leave evidence of that? Second, the handful of cases where ag started independently in the Holocene spread from 10Kya to 4Kya, so we have quite a number of data points showing quite a range in how long it takes for ag to develop, after the climactic conditions have stabilized enough to permit it. Are we safe to assume that other than climate, there wasn’t any single event or stimulus that could affect these separated human populations? (Their isolation is required for us to conclude that it’s independent invention. IIRC, Diamond covers this.) ---
**Author:** ![RickJay](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/bb73d2/32.png) [@RickJay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RickJay)\ **Post date:** [August 4, 2014, 9:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/length-of-time-humans-had-fire-before-cooking/693067/34 "2014-08-04T21:12:03Z")
> [@Learjeff](#): > > Clothing has flame retardants. SOME clothing does, and clothing deliberately designed to be flame retardant is a very recent invention. If flammable covering and open fires didn’t go together, the use of open fires would have been given up on a very, very long time ago. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/length-of-time-humans-had-fire-before-cooking/693067.md?page=1)