A World Before Fire: The Human Flame

required for for fire. You need the fuel, you need the heat, you need the oxygen, the tri force of fire, the tri force of fire. Earth didn't always have it, but then the conditions coalesced to where they were available, and then we had fire. And furthermore, fire, as far as we can tell, is an essential component of high technology. Yes, so you're talking about you know, creating, you know, smelting ors, creating settle towards metal tools. All of this requires that

the alchemy of these creations requires fire. So it is very much clear that fire is an essential part of the technological profile of the human species on Earth, you know, beyond stone tools. Fire is how we get stuff done. But there are I mean it has symbolic power too. I mean we get in the whole idea of Promethean fire, like it's this thing that God has brought us. It is the power of power that is from beyond us

that then fills us up. We talk about the fire and the spark of human existence, of the soul of compassion, all of these of these complex ideas are are are wound up in this notion of fire. Yeah. And so the first thing I think we should talk about today is is this concept of the divine spark, not so much in the theological sense, but in the literal sense, Like what what is the human brain look like on fire?

What what is the fire drug done for us? And I think it's been long recognized that that control mastery over fire is one of the essential ingredients in the human animal as it exists today. One of there are things that really makes a stand apart um alongside language. Right, if you had to pick just two things that really make humans different than all the other animals, give me fire and give me some words to talk about fire with,

right to to say while we're setting you on fire. Yeah, But even and this idea goes back a long way so Charles Darwin wrote in The Descent of Man in eight quote the speaking of Humankind quote, he has discovered the art of making fire, by which hard and stringy roots can be rendered digestible and poisonous roots or herbs innocuous. This discovery of fire probably the greatest ever made by man,

accepting language, dates from before the dawn of history. I think we can all agree on that, right, fire comes before history. But exactly how long before history? And one thing you might be surprised to learn is that this is not a settled question. Exactly when fire emerges in human history is still up for debate. Yeah. The predictions vary from a brown from a near forty thousand years ago to four hundred thousand, five hundred thousand, or even

in the in the very extreme cases one point six. Yeah,

and so they're all over the map. I looked at one paper by A. J. A. J. Gaulet, who is an anthropologist and archaeologists called the discovery of fire by humans a long and convoluted process in philosophical Transation Transactions of the Royal Society b from sixteen and he looks over a lot of the evidence and says so much archaeological investigation into the emergence of fire has been very focused on the search for hearths, right, this is this is the big thing you want to find as evidence

of of hominins using fire, is these fireplaces. Hearths a place where you put all your fuel together and you'd burn it. Evidence for hearts seems to appear around zero point seven to zero point four million years ago, or I guess we could just say four hundred thousand, seven hundred thousand years ago, But that's not necessarily the earliest emergence of fire use among humans. That's just when we

start finding these fireplaces. In fact, evidence of burning, Galllet says appears at archaeological sites starting around one point five million years ago. But it's it's kind of difficult because just using fire doesn't necessarily always leave good evidence that can be found, you know, more than a million years later, So you really have to be on the lookout for things that are difficult to find, and they might not

always leave a trace at all. Yeah, Like as with a lot of things in the fossil record, in the archaeological record, it's kind of a crap shoot as to whether it's actually going to be preserved and then if it's preserved, it's going to be discovered. Right. But so Galllet says that, you know, one way to think about it might be that it's not just that we had fire and then we didn't. But there's sort of a three stage process for the human acquisition of fire. And

uh so Gallant says, first, what about fire foraging? So fire foraging is is an interesting first step in the acquisition of fire because it doesn't require the control of fire, just an attraction to it. So what would you have in mind if you hear the words fire foraging? You're going around looking for fire, not exactly your or you might be following fire around, but instead you go to a place where a wildfire has burned, and then you

gain the chance for a bonus of free resources. I kind of think about it how like if you're ever in a video game like Legend of Zelda, and you go around and you like burn a bunch of bushes or something, and then under the bushes there might be some rupees or some goodies something to find there. This

is kind of what that is like. So you go to a place where wildfire is burning and there might be bird eggs or rodents or lizards or other small animals exposed that you can eat, and it might also render these So it renders these resources more visible obviously because it eliminates cover easier to obtain and possibly also more digestible by accidental cooking. But there's a reason that early humans and and hominids would have been drawn to

a blaze. They would have seen the smoke on the horizon really through some sort of wildfire scenario going on, and they would have sought it out from sources. Yeah. Yeah, And we can talk about some modern analogies to how these these creatures may have uh felt about fire by looking at some some modern primates today, but we'll talk about that later in the episode. And just for analogies in non human animals in nature, there are other animals that do this there, for example, birds that are known

as fire followers. You know, fire foraging among avians makes it seem like it could easily have been done by hominins a long time ago too. But then so Gablet also says, you know, you've got a couple of stages after fire foraging. You've got he says, quote social slash domestic hearth, fire for protection and cooking. Okay, so you have a fire that you can gather around, there's warmth, there's light, and there is there's heat for cooking food.

And then third, finally, fires used as tools in the technological processes like firing pottery or making metal tools or things like that are creating a you know, adhesives on things that take fire to make. But I think that thing about fire foraging is an interesting first step because it sort of shows you how you could maybe bridge the gap between a primate species that doesn't understand anything

about fire and one that starts to use fire. You know, you don't have to go just straight from being afraid of fire to using it. Technologically, you sort of have this bridge, right, a behavioral bridge from one to the other. Yeah. One is tempted to make an analogy to the taming of a wild animal. At first, you know, you know what it is, you learn, you learn to be a little more comfortable around it, you know what kind of distance to give it, uh, how much space needs to

be between you and the animal. And then eventually you get to the point where you have worked out a relationship with the animal, you have tamed it, and that's sort of what happens with fire over time. So you can imagine going from simply seeking out the fire, keeping a distance from the fire because you know that even though it it unwraps these resources for you, it itself

is hot and burns you. And then over time you become comfortable enough with it to start playing with a little bit, sticking sticks into it, and then eventually even capturing portions of it and figuring out ways to utilize it. This is an interesting thing to think about. Commonly, it is very common. I bet you listening right now have this, have had this experience. It is extremely common for humans

to want to play with fire. I I know, I feel this feeling like there's a there's a campfire, and you just feel this urge to kind of like poke at it with a stick or something. That I had this experience with my my son recently at a a fall celebration with some family. Uh, they had a camp fire set up and we had some sticks with marshmallows, and you know, instructed him on how to cook the marshmallow.

But then I at the end of it, I said, now you can just poke the stick around in the fire, because I know that's really having been a little boy myself, and still having that little boy within me. I know that that's really what we want to do. We don't want to cook the marshmallows so much as we're going to just poke the ever loving hell out of that fire, you know, and watch the sparks rise up and watch

coal's collapse and that, I mean, that's the experience. But I feel like this is something that's not just like a like a cognitively obtained behavior like using an an Excel spreadsheet might be. It feels instinctual, right, and it certainly does to me. I think you would report if small children seem to do it without prompting. There's this this instinctual draw to play with fire. Why on earth

would that be an instinct? I mean, instinct is generally something that has been selected for by evolution, So why would evolution favor this instinct to go mess around with something that could burn you or even kill you unless there's some kind of compensating benefit, And it seems like for humans there probably has been, right because you compared it to taming an animal. We haven't just tamed an animal,

we have tamed a demon. Right, Yeah, one is it wants them to think of the gin that has a fire that like a genie that one has has captured and and and enslaved for your own purposes. Pretty much with the fire demon in uh Was, which was the Miyazaki movie with the fire demon not spirited away but how's moving castle? Oh yeah, I remember that one. Yeah, I think that's that's a good fire demon. It's a good fire demon. Yeah, and they put him to work.

But it but it also, like a gin, grants your wishes, right, So let's let's take a moment to think about some of the wishes that have been granted by the demon fire. Um. Some of these we've touched on already. If we called on, do we have to phrase them in a way that they can't come back to it? Us? Um No, because fire does come back to bite if there's no there's no avoiding that make me a cheese sentimatech So, first of all, the ability to cast light upon an uncertain,

frightening and death filled night. Yeah, I mean think back to I think of this anytime around the campfire. Just think of like the primordial environment. You're huddled around this light, this heat source, and then it's gives you the ability to cast light on a world it's full of dangers, human dangers as well as predators, as well as just the problem of you tripping over a root and dying

in the night and then being consumed by predators. One thing is, without fire, you can just pretty much bet that humans would not exist at certain latitudes, right right, Yeah. Fire gives us the ability to warm ourselves in increasingly colder environments, so you're no longer forced to range south in the winter or to stick to natural refuges of thermal springs. That's uh, that's something that I remember coming up,

been studying saunas before. Like the long history of our association with with geothermal vents is that like these were these were little uh redoubts of of heat and civilization that early people could could range between. Interesting. But with fire, you can create your own little redoubt of warmth anywhere you want to, uh, in a in an increasingly chilly environment. Now, a big one to come back to that cheese sandwich, you mentioned the ability to externalize human digestion through the

use of cooking. Like, that's that's one way I like to think of of of cooking, you know, because it's more than just oh, I put some char in this cheese, and now it's it's what's wonderful, and it is wonderful, But it goes far beyond that. Cooking makes char on cheese? Is that wonderful char on steak? Don't? Well? Maybe not char. You've had cheese sticks, right, and you know where the cheese comes off, the grilled cheese, and it kind of hardens into this you know what, I doubted you, but

now I know you know what, You're tough. That's that's delicious. However, it doesn't really break down like the core benefits of cooking fairly man, because a lot of those come down to meat. Uh. Cooking meat makes it easier to digest, It reduces the cost of meat digestion. Just coming at it from you know, an economic bio energy standpoint, It compromises the structural integrity of the tissue by gelatinizing the collagen. Cooking also cleanses foods. It destroys parasites, pathogens, and even

renders many natural toxins harmless. Poison fruits become foods, etcetera. Okay. On top of this, fire enables the transformation of resources such as raw or into weapons, which can then be used for your hunt. Uh. Fire eventually fuel the Industrial Revolution. The burning of fossil fuels propelled us into the modern age,

into the space age. Even so, if if man looms large uh in a in a grand scheme of things, it's because the demon fire stands about behind it, casting a shadow across the world and beyond, as Rocky Aerrison would say, and for the fire demon. Yeah. And so one particular aspect of what you just talked about I want to look at is cooking, cooking as a feature

of the history and development of the human species. So there is a Harvard primatologist named Richard Wrangham and also a Harvard biologist Rachel Carmody, and they've put forward this interesting hypothesis I was reading about about how cooking by way of harnessing of fire made us into the humans we are today. And so this is not considered proven. There are arguments made against it, but I think it's

really interesting and worth taking a look at. So how could cooking make us into the creatures we are today? Especially from a mental point of view. Well, one thing to think about is how your body at a total state of rest is just a vampire. It is absolutely energy ravenous, and I think sometimes people don't realize how much energy is burned just by being alive, just by

the steady processes like circulation, digestion, and homeostasis. So I put together an example just to illustrate how much energy this takes comparatively, uh, and I used a couple of calorie counters provided by the Mayo Clinic and Runners World websites with you know, so take this with the warning that these types of apps offer sort of general estimates shouldn't be taken as perfect or exact, but based on this imagine you are a thirty year old female who

is five ft six and weighs a hundred and forty five pounds. You burn a hundred about seventeen fifty calories a day at rest, one thousand and seven fifty calories doing nothing. If you just lie in bed and watch what would you watch all day? A very low energy thing to watch on TV? I don't know, Buffy watching Buffy. Just watch Buffy all day. Now, to burn that same amount of energy through exercise, a hundred and forty five pound adult would have to run about sixteen miles at

a pace of six miles per hour. The entire time. That's more than half of a marathon race. So I don't know, it just doesn't seem like laying there watching Buffy all day is about the same amount of energy work as running more than half of a marathon. But it is. Yeah, It's kind of like when you look at like business expenses and look at the sheer costs of just keeping the lights on the overhead, the overhead of a picul of business, the overhead for business human

is uh is pretty staggering. Yeah, and so what are what where is all that energy going? Well, it's like we said, it powers a lot of different things that power circulation, digestion, respiration. But one of the most energy hungry organs in the human body, maybe the most energy hungry I've seen different claims about that, UH is the brain. So despite being only a very small percentage of the average human body weight, I think I've seen some like two percent or so, it regularly uses around a fifth

of the body's total available metabolic energy. Of twenty of all the energy your body uses is going to the brain. I'll lighten up those synapses, things going back and forth. And according to one study I read from n each unit of brain tissue. So that's unit by mass uses about twenty two times the amount of metabolic energy that is used by the equivalent amount of muscle tissue. Being smart is very costly from an energy perspective, and we

know that all organisms live in a very tight energy economy. Right, Yeah, there's not a lot, there's not room for a lot of wasted effort or even any wasted effort really when it comes to an organism. Right. Uh, so we know now, we know that the brain needs a large amount of energy in order to be powerful and formidable and intelligent, like a big primate brain is. But if you go

back a few decades, scientists noticed this curious fact. So they said, when you look across species with varying rates of what's called encephalization, meaning you know, investing evolutionarily in a large, powerful brain blowing the head up, incephalized mammals don't seem to show a corresponding increase in their basal metabolic rate. So you make a bigger brain, but you're in you're investing in this energy hungry organ but you're not showing greater energy needs than a similar sized animal

that doesn't invest in encephalization. So for a for a comparison, it's kind of like if you have two families that live next door to one another, and you know they both have the same income, and suddenly one of the families buys a yacht. So you're kind of thinking, how where did that want for that? Yeah, what's this other line of revenue that is that is enabling them to

make this purchase? Right, So, there was a big influential paper in nineteen that offered a potential solution to this, a hypothesis to explain this, and it was known as the expensive tissue hypothesis. This was by A. Leslie C. I. L Oh and Peter Wheeler in Current Anthropology. And so what they said is one way you could pay for the brain would be to cut investments in other quote expensive organs, such as the gut. Right, So, a powerful, costly digestive system is required if you want to get

the maximum energy out of bad food. Essentially, so if you've got raw, tough, hard to digest, low quality foods, you need a big, powerful gut to get all the energy out of them. But if you can imagine an organism could convert most of its diet away from all of that junk into high quality, high nutrition, easy to digest foods. Then it could cut what it invests in the gut and the digestive system, and I'll and get cut down that budget and invest all of those savings

into the brain. So the original proponents of the expensive tissue hypothesis, they were focused on meat to Their idea is that you know, these hominins converted a large part of their diet from tough, hard to digest plant matter over to meat and animal products, and they could get more nutrition with less work for the digestive system. I can imagine that the TV advertisement for for meat at the time. Yea more bang for your bite, get smart quick with meat. Right. It sounds like a fallout kind

of yeah. But so here's where Rangum and Carmody, That where their hypothesis comes in. What if instead of just upgrading to meat, what if one of the significant upgrades was too cooked food, allowing for easier digestion and a bigger brain. So about one point seven million years ago or so, about the time of the emergence of Homo erectus,

when the modern human body plan first shows up. This is when you see human bodies that are shaped more or less like Homo sapiens are today cooking Under this hypod this is could have entered the scene, making difficult foods, tough roots and tubers and stuff available on the open savannah into a digestible, a real thing that you could digest and get good energy from as long as you could cook it. Now, I said that this hypothesis was

not fully accepted everywhere, and that's the case. So from what I'm reading more research has seriously called into question many aspects of our previous understanding of the expensive tissue hypothesis. There appears to be a period of right now conflicting

evidence and reinterpretation. Just doing a search for scientific articles published within the last four years or so, I found a bunch claiming to find evidence for the expensive tissue hypothesis within certain species or groups of animals, others claiming not to find any evidence within certain species or groups. So, as far as I can tell, this one is up

in the air. Um And with respect to the cooking hypothesis, one important piece of evidence would be that in order to sort of track within cephalization history with the growing brains of our hominid ancestors, it would need to be supported by evidence of very early fire use in hominids. Now earlier, what did we say was the earliest known

fire use. We saw those hearths, you know, four hundred thousand, seven hundred thousand years ago or so, we saw maybe evidence of burning going back earlier, maybe to one point five million years ago or something like that. But this would need to show fire use going way way back earlier than is generally accepted. But I would also say within the realm of possibility, maybe maybe you degree based on what we've read, well, I think the Yeah, their

arguments on both sides that are interesting. One that I ran across just to base it in, like a very simple study from two thousand seven in which the researchers studied effects of cooking and also grinding the meals of a Burmese python. So they found that just cooking the meat and these beef, just cooking the beef alone decreased the cost of digestion absorption and assimilation by twelve point

seven percent. Grinding it decreased it by twelve point four percent, for a total culinary discount of twenty three point for four percent. Okay, so they've externalized some of the digestion of this cow for a Burmese python, right, and certainly you know Burmese pythons to not to cook on their own, but but probably right, well yeah, I mean, you know,

except maybe in the story books. But but yeah, this is the interesting thing about this is that on one handed sort of backs backs up these ideas of yes, there's a there is a deaf and definite evolutionary advantage in cooking meat, but it's in looking back, like the history of of culinary arts and culinary preparation, if you can't really discount the grinding, the the the the dissimilation of food as well like being able to break foods down into not only cooking them into forms that are

more palpable and more consumable, but also just physically altering them. And and I can't help but think of of the use of fire and therefore smoke as a as a as a food preservation technique as well, being able to smoke your food so that you have that nutritional power up for later, uh, perhaps in a time when when they're when resources are less available. So I think I think it becomes a more complex pattern as you see culinary practices evolve within early people. Yeah, that's that's not

kind of take on it anyway. Well, I mean another thing to think about though, this is, uh, this is probably not super scientific, but just to check your own reflections. As long as we're talking about human nature, we asked this about poking fire. How often do you really just want to eat all your food raw? Is that a desire you have or do you feel a deep instinctual desire for cooked food? Well? Not fruit, I'm I'm I'm rather I have to be talked into say cooking pineapple fruit.

Fruit is often the exception, right, that's often the exception given to this statement that humans tend to prefer cooked foods, and humans in fact aren't the only animals that seem to prefer cooked foods. In fact, I found one study from actually from also in Proceedings of the Royal Society

be called Cognitive Capacities for Cooking and Chimpanzees. And so one of the things they talked about in this study is they said, okay, so we've got chimpanzees, and we found out across nine studies that chimpanzees prefer cooked food.

They like to cook food better than raw food. They also found that the Chimpanzees can understand that raw food is transformed into cooked food through cooking, and so they can sort of generalize this understanding and other context They can get the point that if I have a piece of raw food, cooking can turn it into cooked food. They also will wait for cooked food. They will delay gratification if the reward is the food being cooked. They will give uper all food in order to see it

transformed into cooked food. And they can transport and save or all food in anticipation of future cooking. So I don't know that that seems to to go along with this sort of instinctual thing that I think we all feel and that I think has been found in other animals too, that you don't just get more out of digestion when food is cooked, but you have this natural preference for it. Yeah, and certainly that's that matches up with human experience. We have this primal relationship with with cooking.

We want to cook our food, I mean, we have Michael Pollen in particular has a number of means. He's written and produced documentaries that touch on this time and time again. We have this this kind of inborn desire to want to manipulate our foods via cooking, transform them into these other forms. And when that, when those techniques, when those practices leave our lives, we we we feel drawn to h to commune with him another way, such as watching a cooking shows all the time, that sort

of thing, you know. Speaking of Michael Paul and I one of the articles I read about the cooking hypothesis, and this was from a few years ago, so he might have changed his mind since then, but at the time of the article he said that he was he felt pretty convinced by the cooking hypothesis, this hypothesis that cooking is sort of an evolved biological trait that coincides with greater incphilization or investment in brain tissue in humans. Yeah, like I said, I think there's a strong case to

be made there. So earlier I mentioned that paper by Galllet about the history of acquiring fire by by humans, and he's the one who talked about the fire foraging bridge, and he mentions one way that that might play into the cooking hypothesis that I think is interesting. So I

just want to read a section from his worker. He says, quote the analogy with other animals might suggest that in the first instance, early hominins would go to fires simply to take advantage of any additional opportunities of gaining prey, regardless of what are the resources were cooked. For example, the fire might reveal a clutch of eggs, so much better if it has baked them. Uh that would that technically be baked if the shell is still on. I don't know. That seems kind of gross, but I've never

really done that before. Maybe, yeah, I mean, I don't know. It would be kind of like a boiled egg. I guess, right, I don't know. I've never seen it on the menu baked eggs, but I've never seen it in the shell on the menu. Yeah, well except in a boiled egg, right, yeah, but not but not like over an open flame. Interesting, somehow, it seems like it would explode. I don't know why

I think that. Well, that's an experiment for some of our listeners to fill us in about, or that's an experiment for us to do on Facebook Live right here in the office. Open fire. But yeah, so anyway, gallet

continues quote for insevilization. New cranial finds are altering the figures rapidly, but at the moment it would seem that the average cranial capacity for early Homo at one point eight million years ago, and so that's starring, you know, close to the time of the emergence of Homorectus is six hundred to six hundred and fifty cubic centimeters, which is forty two greater than for most apes and australiopithesnes

other related animals at the time. And yet this is earlier than Richard Rangham's postulated date of one point seven million years ago for applying the cooking hypothesis. And then he concludes saying, perhaps the fire foraging is one important element and the cooking hypothesis comes into play more strongly later,

but other factors operate alongside both. So this is talking about how these the fire foraging and the cooking hypothesis, if they're both, you know, correct models of of the history of humanity, how they sort of could fit together. They're like a jigsaw puzzle that led to the fire. I want to say, the fire regime that usually is another meaning that the fire regime within the command of

human power and technology, and then the rest is history. Alright, We're gonna take a quick break and when we come back, we're going to discuss us what it means to get fire. I want to position yourself for career success. Master the Fundamentals of Business with hb X Core, a three course online program developed by Harvard Business School faculty. Immerse yourself in real world case studies as you dive and do

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credential from hb X and Harvard Business School. After successful completion of the program, boost your resume, grow your network, and advance your career with the hb X Core credential from HBX and Harvard Business School. To learn more, visit about hb X dot com slash how stuff Works. All right, we're back now. We all know what it means to get fired, but we don't necessarily often think about what it means to get fired. Do you ever really think about this, Robert like to get it to sort of

understand what the deal with fire is. If I were to take my dog up to a big bond fire, I don't think he really understands how fire works. I don't know. I mean, maybe I'm not giving him enough credit, but I don't know what you think about that. I feel like the ability to sort of get fired just basically get a sense of, Okay, here's what you can expect a fire to do, here's you know. Here, here's what you don't have to worry about. Here's what you do have to worry about in the presence of fire.

That's not something animals usually tend to seem to understand. Yeah, I'm not convinced that my cat understands fire. And this is often one of the distinctions made between humans and other tool using animals is that humans are the only organisms on Earth that you know, of course, know how to use and control fire. Animals are often surprisingly clever, but their reaction to fire can be sort of characterized mostly by avoidance behaviors, and if not just by avoidance behaviors.

There are some animals that might approach fire to try to find pray or something. They do seem to be purely reactive right that they're they're just acting on instinct. Most animals tend to avoid or flee fire or even the sound of fire. And it's been shown that elephants become distressed and released stress hormones in response to wildfire. But some research published in two thousand and ten by Jill Pruittz and Thomas Leduke I thought was very interesting

in this regard because they observed savannah chimpanzees. So these are chimpanzees living on the savannah lands pan troglodites various in Fongoli Synegal, and they recorded their reactions during these two encounters with wildfires in March and April two thousand six.

So you've got these savannah chimpanzees, they're living out on the plane is there in the shrub land, and and a wildfire comes along, and the researchers right that during these two encounters, the chimpanzees, unlike many other animals, reacted pretty much totally calmly in the presence of fire, and they would loiter near the edge of the fire and groom themselves they'd be, you know, a few meters away

from the fire. They go fishing for termites, they'd eat some saba fruit even as smoke from the fire was coming up to block the sunlight, or maybe climbing a tree they've just been resting in a few minutes before. And they said that, you know, the chimps would move to stay out of the path of the fire as it traveled. Uh. And these brush brush fires came at the end of the dry season, so there's plenty of dry fuel all around, and the fires can travel actually

rather quickly, But the chimps just didn't panic. Instead, they seemed to be totally confident in predicting the movements of the fire and thus avoiding it. Uh. And this doesn't mean they have an understanding of the chemistry of fire, but to some ex then it requires that they have this kind of unspoken, rudimentary understanding of how fire works.

For instance, that it requires fuel to burn right, that if you get out of the way of maybe a connecting line between the fire and some other piece of fuel, it's not going to come towards you. And also that its movement can be predicted by things like the direction and speed of the wind and of course the location of the available fuel. So, in other words, it seemed

like the chimps were conceptualizing fire. These chimpanzees were basically showing that they understand how fire works, like an environmental understanding of fire, and they knew how to give it an appropriate distance. They knew how to get out of its way but without panic. Though they certainly fall short of being able to exploit it in any real way,

shape or form. Right, But they might not be as far off as you would imagine, because so the researchers set up sort of three steps they hypothesized for master fire, and the first is the step that they think that the chimpanzees have already mastered. Right. The first step is the conceptualization of fire, and they characterize this as an understanding of the behavior under varying conditions that would allow one to predict fire's movement, thus permitting activity in close

proximity to the fire. Then, of course, the second step is the ability to control fire, and this would involve containing it, providing or depriving the fire of fuel, and the ability to put it out. And then third, finally, would be the ability to start a fire on your own, so conceptualization, control, and then starting at yourself. Right, So if we buy into this three step process, you can see that the chimps already seemed to be at step one.

And what it would require for them to start gaining mastery over fire is they wouldn't necessarily already know have to know how to start a fire. I mean that's sort of advanced, difficult knowledge. But imagine if they could just start to figure out that, Hey, if I get some of this fire on a stick and wave it around, I can really scare off predators. Yeah, I mean, it's the basic Mogli scenario right, exactly enough, the tigers your

Cohn with the with the burning branch. But that to me does not actually seem all that implausible as chimp behavior. I mean, that seems basically within primate tool use capability already using tools using sticks, Like what's the difference between poking a stick uh into a log to obtain termites versus sticking a stick into an active fire to obtain just a piece of its power? And they do seem

to respect its power in another interesting way. So Prue It's speaking to Iowa State News about her research, was describing a thing that she observed, which was a fire dance being performed by one of the males of these chimpanzees. So she says, quote, chimps everywhere have what's called a rain dance. Jane Goodall, a famed primatologists, coined that term,

and it's just big male display to show dominance. Males display all the time for a number of different reasons, but when there's a big thunderstorm approaching, they do this really exaggerated display. It's almost like slow motion. And when I was with this one party of chimps, the dominant male did the same sort of thing, but it was towards the fire, so I call it a fire dance.

She also reports that she heard what seemed to her to be a unique vocalization that was made at the approaching fire that maybe in some way linked to, you know, like maybe a fire signal. And it's interesting too that there's this connection to with thunder that a thunderstorm and and a fire and the like. Is if there there's some connection there that is perceived ever so out, ever

so foggily. The primates mind these powerful energetic forces of nature that you can sort of understand and be calm around, but you you also have to respect their power. Uh. And so there's also you can look this up online if you want. There's some videos of the chimps around the edge of the fire, and it's the fire is burning through the brush and you can see them just sort of lazing around, grooming, hanging out while this brush fire smolders a few meters away. It's pretty strange to see.

But this also makes me wonder what underlies the ability of an organism to control fire, you know, so, like, what are the first steps? And it makes me think that the first prerequisite to an organism that's about to gain fire control or fire technology is probably just overcoming much older instinctual fire fire behaviors, which are avoidance behaviors and escape behaviors. Generally animals want to get away from fire. To control fire, you have to approach it and you

have to remain near it. And I don't know, so that seems it's like there's this sort of suicidal first step on the road to the greatest unleashing of technological capability that could happen for an animal on earth. Yeah, and then you have to steal a portion of it, and then you have to contain it. You almost kind of have to kind of a domestication of the flame, yea, so conceptualization, the ability to control it may be sequestered in a hearth. But then of course that third step

is the ability to start a fire. And then and it's it's interesting to just look at how pervasive that is, even though a lot of us would be kind of thrown for a loop if we had to produce it without tools or instruments. But basically every human society can produce fire basically. They're interestingly enough, there are some and I have to say they're some of these claims are dubious. Uh,

there's some some controversy about these. But there have been claims that you have Aboriginal people of Tasmania as well as the Sentinalise people of the Adaman Islands. This is a south eastern part of the Bay of bengal Um.

There have been claims that these are the only native peoples who have survived into the nineteenth century without possessing the knowledge of fire creation and instead had to you know, quote unquote keep the fire burning, preserving lightning born embers, perhaps in hollowed out trees like so they had to keep it in the cage and not let it go out. According to these According to these allegations are that they

have to we have to catch it. That's not the Promethean idea, like Prometheus gave it, gave us this fire, he didn't tell us how to make it, so store it somewhere nights, like in a hollowed out lock. This strikes me as one of those things that could easily be one of those sort of wrong racist colonial discussions. Yeah, because you know, to what extent there's also sort of a modern longing for like that primal existence, I think.

But also they have the possibility for for racist attitudes of these You know, these savages clearly don't have the mastery of fire. They can only find it and then carry it around. Um, it would seem based on the research I was looking at, you could make a stronger case for the Sentinalese people. Uh, but it seems to

remain an open question. It's it's worth noting that maintaining fire, carrying embers from one place to another, for instance, might not be such a weird thing to do in an extremely wet tropical environment that limits your access to dry, combustible materials, right, So like if you've always got fuel available, Yeah, um, well you might. Even if you knew how to start a fire, it might always be easier to just keep

one burning. So what's the point? Yeah, I mean, if anyone is ever even if you've just stayed in a cabin and maintained a fire in the hearth to keep warm, you know, you know, it can be kind of a pain in the butt to see, even if you've got matches, Even if you've got matches and lighter fluid and all the rigamarole, sometimes it's easier just to keep some portion of a fire hot, keep the coals warm, uh, inactive

long enough to reignite it later. That doesn't mean you don't know how to make fire, but sometimes it's the most expedient course. Well, now that I think about it, I know that's what I do. I mean, if I were out in the wilderness, I always try to keep something on fire instead of instead of wanting to have

to restart it every time. Yeah, I mean, I think back on the voice out methods of you know, the flint and or using a little little bow method that I never could get to work, or using a crystal I gotta say, I think that bow method you're talking about, the one where you get the get the stick in the string, yes, and you roll it back and forth to create fire through friction with the wood on wood. Yeah, that's my My position is that that is a scam

that nobody's ever actually done that. Uh, if you've seen video of it, I think it's it's made with Hollywood magic. I think I don't believe in it. Yeah, it's certainly it would seem like it would be easier to keep that the ambers going as opposed to doing that. But anyway, that's that's our that's our take on it. Anyway, maybe I'm just speaking out of bitterness from my childhood something

I tried and failed at many times. So as long as we're talking about fire in the human brain, I also did want to throw in one thing that I thought was kind of interesting. It's just a metaphor. But so people are always trying to come up with physical metaphors to explain the nature of conscious us. You know, what is consciousness? It's like it's one of the big mysteries left out there. There are a lot of big mysteries, I guess in science, but consciousness is one of the

thorniest of them because it's inherently subjective. You're essentially saying, what can be the explanation for the existence of subjectivity? Why aren't we all just automata with no experience? And so you've got these people who would say, well, we're we're panpsychists, right, and we believe that all matter is in some way conscious, at least in some really rudimentary way,

that consciousness is an inherent property of objects. And then on the other hand, you've got like the physicist Max Tegmark, who has proposed that consciousness is a state of matter like solid or liquid or gas. You know, at some point matter arranges itself into some kind of information processing state,

and this is like a new state of matter. Uh. And then some have also proposed that consciousness, though it's it's not that it's nonphysical, it's based on physical reality, is not a physical object or a physical quantity, but it's rather a process. It's more like consciousness is not the ball or the bat or the player, but the game of baseball being played. And uh. And another way to think about it in that sense would be that

consciousness could be kind of like fire. Yeah, since that you know, fire isn't so much the substance, but it is the interaction of things happening to chemical reaction. What is consciousness but a slow motion explosion somedays more than others. But yeah, I think that's a that's a valid point. Yeah, in the same sense that the gases and the oxygen and the fuel are not themselves fire, but they are reacting to create fire, to to create this thing that

we call fire. Maybe all the you know, the cells in your brain are not consciousness, but that they generate this, uh, this combined property, this event we think of as consciousness, and that we experience his consciousness. Just a weird thing to think about. Well, on that note, Joe, I'd like to end this episode in the this this pair of episodes with a quote from one of one of my favorite books, and I know you appreciate this one as well,

Coran McCarthy's The Road. It's also one of my favorite books. There. There's a common motif in the book, uh that when I first read it, I admit I didn't fully understand what was going on when they were talking, when the characters were talking about this, but they the main characters are a father, and a son. It takes place in a cold and dying world after the collapse of civilization and technology. But the father and the son often speak about carrying the fire. Indeed, so here's the quote, and

I'll leave this for everyone to contemplate. You have to carry the fire. I don't know how to. Yes, you do. Is the fire real? The fire? Yes it is? Where is it? I don't know where it is. Yes, you do. It's inside you. It always was there. I can see it all right, everybody. If you would like to get in touch with us, you can find us stuff to

Blow your Mind dot com. You'll find the podcast episodes there, you'll find the blog posts, you'll find videos, and you'll find links out to various social media accounts such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumbler and the like. And if you'd like to spread the fire to us, you can reach us by email at blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com