Fire

A long time after beginning to use, manipulate and create tools, humans achieved their second, and most significant, advancement – the rational management of fire. While there are other animals that use tools in some fashion, such as the stick-wielding chimpanzees, only man has conquered fire.  It is this achievement which truly elevates him above other life forms on the planet. These flames gave him a control over his environment that no other animal knows.

Previous to this accomplishment, man’s domain was apparently limited to the warmer parts of the world, in particular East Africa, the Near East and India. After gaining control over fire, the species began to spread into Europe and crossed the Himalayas into China, newly enabled to thrive in these colder environments. Eventually, they even crossed the frigid Siberian wastes and entered the Americas from the North some 13,000 years ago. Anthropologists estimate that they had reached Tierra del Fuego, at the southernmost tip of South America, only a few centuries later.

The flames our earliest ancestors carried would do more than simply warm their bodies, cook their food and ward off predators.  As if to demonstrate for the whole world that they had truly leapt far ahead on the road of evolution, men set the land ablaze.  By doing this in Spring and Autumn, they protected themselves from wild conflagrations in the summer. They cleared forests to make them passable and safe for people. And they unknowingly developed a method of clearing land that would make their farms, as yet unthought-of, more fertile and useful.

Fire began to change them physically, for one thing. The fossil record tells us that our ancestors began to develop resistance to air pollution about 100,000 years ago. Cooking improved the digestibility of raw vegetables and made meat even safer to eat. This undoubtedly brought more meat into men’s diets because it could be used to harass, corral and entrap large herbivores so that they could be slaughtered. This increase in dietary protein would have permitted more growth in infancy and adolescence, so that they became bigger and taller.

Improved nutrition gave them longer life and a better chance at surviving infancy. A slow population explosion occurred and drove man across the entire face of the Earth, carrying embers with him, or simply preserving the knowledge and tools necessary to recreate fire wherever he dwelled.

Finally, we don’t know when or where, he realized that fire, properly utilized, could alter the malleability of metals such as copper. Thus metallurgy was born somewhere in our deep past.

Sources

Durant, Will (1954). Our Oriental Heritage, New York: Simon and Schuster

TimeFrame (1990). The Human Dawn, Alexandria, VA: Time-Life Books

Fire. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved May 31, 2011, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire