So I’m watching a movie about coal miners, and suddenly i pictured in my mind the continuum from the discovery of fire through to the global oil industry, and it occurred to me that for maybe most of our history as a species, we have built our survival and progress on burning shit.
Putting aside the impossibility of this speculation–the inevitability of capturing and taming lightning–let’s perform this thought experiment: imagine the history of our species without the ability to light things on fire.
I mean, we still got thumbs and brains, right? What might we have built? With what alternate realities of human migration, civilization building, the environment, ad infinitum?
Fire (or at least intense heating) is key to making many sources of macronutrients digestible, facilitating metalworking and mineral extraction, and of course survival in freezing temperatures. Without fire there would be no human civilization and indeed no presence outside of central Africa.
By, “we” I assume you mean hominids, as there was no species defined as homo sapiens by the time of the creation of fire.
Things are certainly lost in the mists of time here, and it’s hard to say how things work out if things don’t go the way they did, but if early hominids hadn’t discovered and harnessed fire, then I doubt that they would have had a much better go at it than other species.
I doubt that homo sapiens, with our larger brains and probably higher intelligence ends up evolving out of erectus.
As Stranger said, fire unlocks and makes more available a number of nutrients that otherwise would be unavailable. Our brains are a pretty expensive piece of real estate, and without these nutrients being available, would likely not have had a reason or ability to develop.
Plus side, anthropomorphic climate change wouldn’t be much of an issue.
The issue isn’t really one of discovering fire, but learning how to control it.
Nearly all animals have ‘discovered’ fire, in that their species has had an encounter with it. What makes it different for humans is that humans learned how to control it, and use it for its purposes.
They could have a variety of tools, either stone or wood. Stone axes could chop, wood could be lashed together by plant strands, etc. So dwellings would be possible, as well as hunting and fishing, and sun-dried foods could be put away for later. Fruit could be harvested, and crops developed and grown. They could have language, both spoken and written. The Incans kept records by using quipu, fiber strings. As long as they had fibers, they could have clothing. If Stonehenge and other monumental structures were indeed calendars, they could do astronomy and mathematics. Since they couldn’t work metals, they couldn’t create social media, so they might be called a more advanced civilization than ours.
True enough, though as pedantry there’s still be potential use of sun drying, fermentation and preservation via salt or other desiccants.
My understanding is that human brain development was enhanced by have access to high energy diets that meant not needing to spend waking hours foraging.
Early humans who found themselves in a niche where their only calorie source is low quality plant matter, in the manner of giant pandas with bamboo or koalas with eucalypt leaves, won’t develop the skills to build Stonehenge even with opposable thumbs.
Who has ever said that humans can’t digest raw meat? Cooking food makes it more digestible, sure, but people across all cultures and times have eaten raw meats.
Did cooked food lead to human brain development? Maybe, possibly, some scientists speculate. Scientists also speculate that early Homo on the savanna were vegan.
What would have happened if we didn’t have cooked food? Nobody has a clue. You can’t extrapolate two million years of evolution.
I suspect you don’t really mean “discovered” fire, so much as figured out how to manifest fire and harness it for their own purposes. Because fire can, and does, erupt by natural means without humans having to intervene.
I don’t think humans could have evolved at all without it. Heating them through the ice age, cooking food for improving diet, lighting their way through darkness; without that humans would have potentially died out.
Yes, but even with those, fire can make them better. There’s such a thing as fire hardening wood to make a spear point. Apparently it makes them more brittle, but they can be made lots faster.
Fire can also change the nature of stone, although I’ve forgotten the details, even which kind of stone. All I remember is that it improves some stone tools for some uses. I think it may require the stone have fat or oil on it before firing.
Fire can also be used in the mining of stone for tools. They did mine flint and perhaps other kinds of stone in the stone age. They didn’t just use what they found on the ground.
Well, sure. Obviously this is a very silly hypothetical. But the custom is to not fight the hypothetical no matter how silly it is, or else simply not post. That’s what I do to 99% of these silly hypotheticals, except that I saw a way to slyly end with a joke. @Senegoid got the spirit right.
I don’t think any of the other apes are known to be vegan. Why would early Homo have been?
That’s the question, I suppose. We’d also have had a lot harder time protecting ourselves from predators.
But I do wonder how it would have affected our development if we’d managed to pull it off anyway. As it is, we must have fire – but the fire that’s essential to our lives is also an ever-present danger, and would I suspect generally have been much more so than it is now with current building and safety techniques. What has it done to our psychological development, that what makes it possible for us to live also so easily causes us extreme pain and/or kills us?
Scientists speculate a lot. I’m just saying that for the sake of this hypothetical you can’t make firm claims about how we would have evolved, since we’re not close to sure about how we did.