… was an important step for humanity, an estimated million years ago, as well as the Industrial Revolution in the past few centuries: and the imaginings of Ancient Aztec maize fizz as I think about history, the subject, – the immense allure of the Egyptian pyramids contrasted with more modern tides such as the self-sustaining war lodged in Ukraine and the rebirth of Syria – yet I aim to approach social studies with the same balance of skepticism and intuition I’ve adopted for religion.

To put it simply, (thread-able) will be the secular equivalent of spiritual science, with credit given in the direction of reliable evidence, but not absentmindedly – with respect to the overwhelming majority of unrecorded events, as well as those intentionally buried, burned, and borrowed by imperialists, colonialists, and their equivalents. The layman pun of, “Let’s eat, Grandma,” with or without the socially required coma applies heavily here. The nuances of language should be enough to reflect the nuances of reality, even if recreated from a few scrap colors of paint.

While the discovery of fire is far from recorded political history, this topic is an excellent way to break out the wine.

Fire is a phenomenon, and first and foremost a natural one – surprisingly common given the right conditions – in dry or hot settings.

Add a lightning strike in a desert, or tell the story of a swath of forest at the end of its life cycle, and a bird’s nest will seem like ripe kindle, too. Some areas, even in tundras such as Alaska, are recorded as “fire regimes” where up to 100 fires may burn on a summer day for over 20 days. (Gowlett) Therefore, the transition from wildfire to something people were able to tame with the use of dried lumber and communal hearths is an interesting one from multiple perspectives.

Animals similar to humans, such as chimpanzees, have shown a sensible understanding of fire, though they don’t attempt to harness it like we do for warmth in colder seasons, for food and boiling water, for the foraging of simple metal technology…

Archeologists have found evidence of hearths, barely disturbed in the last quarter of a million years or 13,000 generations, in South America and Western Europe, further suggesting the notion of the marriage between humanity and the domesticated flame and the consumption of landscapes for increasingly sophisticated civilizations, most prominently during the expansion of the Roman Empire following a higher demand for metalworking, prompts many people to believe fire is not only an advantage for civilization… but a requirement.

A perception further enhanced by the notion that our food needs to be heated, and thoroughly cooked, before we consider it to be safe for consumption.

Our very genetic makeup seems to depend on the discovery of fire.

The following quotes have been selected from, “The discovery of fire by humans: a long and convoluted process,” by J. A. J. Gowlett, found at the following link: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2015.0164

Nature

Without doubt, natural fire was available on the landscapes inhabited by hominins. Of the millions of lightning strikes that are recorded each year [16], many lead to bush and forest fires, especially at the start of a rainy season: then lightning from the first thunder storms often strikes when much of the vegetation remains dry [52–58]. Most of the instances of relevance are in forest, woodland and savanna, but the fire regimes operate surprisingly far north. Farukh & Hayasaka [59] give the example of Alaska, where up to 100 fires are burning on a given day in the summer season, and important for hominins, they have an average duration of more than 20 days.

Archeology

Despite the increasing numbers of fire sites, their relative scarcity is still notable [126], as is the fact that some very major sites in Europe are totally lacking in fire evidence. These include lower levels at the Caune d’Arago at Tautavel in southern France, where among more than half a million finds of flints and bone there are no burnt traces older than 400 000 years [121]. 

Kindle

They would need good knowledge of slow-burning materials, although field studies show that animal dung is useful in this respect. Ignition is often assumed to have required a cognitive advance. Yet the simplest kindling technique of rubbing a stick in a groove in a wooden ‘hearth’ requires no more than power and basic skill. It does not seem a more complex process than hafting, which it closely resembles in that two component parts require understanding and use of an intermediary: fixative in the one, and tinder in the other (figure 5).

Metalworking

From around 10 000 years ago, agriculture would potentially have widespread effects. Fixed Neolithic settlements, such as Çatalhöyök, would have required wide-ranging foraging for firewood [187], but there are indications in the Levant that woodland was sometimes managed [188]. Soon afterwards, from roughly 5000 years ago come the beginnings of metalworking, first copper and bronze, and then iron. Such interventions involve the raising of temperatures far above those of open fires—the development of a true pyrotechnology [189].

Hearths

 From around 400 000–300 000 years ago when numbers of structured hearths can be seen, they appear to include both large and small in different contexts. Size may depend on immediate purpose and available fuel more than climate. Social factors are also likely to determine whether fires are communal, or specific to nuclear families. We have Late Pleistocene sites such as Meer in Belgium where there are numbers of hearths of different sizes in a small settlement.