Do you think pre-historic people all discovered fire at the same time?

[SociableAtWork]

Inspired by another - great - thread, what do you think?

We know pre-historic people discovered fire but was it at the same time the world over? How did the first one/group/tribe do it, and how d’you think they felt after? How long had they not had it for? How did they then realise they could grind wheat and make bread?

Waste some time with me (please, it’s a dull Sunday) pondering this and other great unknowns!

because of maths and a triangle being the strongest structure without the use of cement.

Watch human on bbc fascinating.
Shows how evolution shaped us and the importance of rituals make up and jewellery.

Were we exposed to fire after natural wildfire and perhaps just kept it going initially? Before learning how to make it? That's a hot country only theory though and I suppose we had migrated to cold areas pre fire? Interesting question!

To be fair @SpottyAardvark as far as civilisations go, Brits were far behind. Language and the evolution lf that, is an interesting way to show how people moved around the globe.

We are natural wanderers, migration has been happening for hundreds of thousands of years. Plus trading in small items like tools and jewellery.

My guess would be that the first ideas about fire being a useful rather than terrifying thong would have been connected to natural forest fires. As scavengers and opportunists they would come across the corpse of an animal who got caught in the fire and fond that the flesh tasted good. They will have observed the forest fires (generally triggered by lightning in a hot dry environment) and grown to understand how it is made more fierce by wind, and how its progress is halted when it reaches rocks or water. They will also have noticed it's power to frighten away the fiercest predator. This gradual understanding of the nature of fire would be in place for generations first, and would spread generally throughout the populations simply as part of their evolutionary adaption of using clever observations to survive and thrive. It's then a relatively easy step from that understanding for an innovative person to have the idea of building a circle of stones somewhere that you actually want a fire, and then go find a burning branch from a natural fire to place it in that location and feed it constantly to keep it going in that tamed and boundaried location, and use it to deliberately roast meat rather than relying on scavanged fire-victim corpses, as well as having a handy way to scare off larger predators. That's a relatively "easy" idea to have, and so I wouldn't expect it to have a single inventor but would be something that got figured out separately among different groups. I would expect that this innovation would naturally lead to the development of specialist roles within thr group as some individuals would need to specialise in keeping the fire burning and under comtrol, with enough fuel and the right balance of wind and protection from rain that it keeps going day and night, while other individuals caught prey to roast. This method of keeping fire tamed would also be in place for generations before artificial methods of starting a fire (when there isn't a handy opportunity to capture wildfire and you can't go and barter for a burning stick from a neighbour) started to be explored. That has to be so because if you don't know that a tamed fire is a good and useful thing to have, there's no reason why you woukd try to make a fire in the first place. By the time anyone is thinking about this problem, there is widespread knowledge about how forest fires start, with lightning hitting a dry tree, and widespread knowledge that small dry twigs and grasses catch more easily than a big log. So it would have been natural for the accidentally fireless people to start off with some kindling and set their minds to thinking about how to create artificially a small ignition event. It's possible that the natural phenomenon that tiny sparks are generated when a flint crashes against metal-rich stones could have been observed just while crossing a suitably rocky scree. It's possible that they had already invented some kind of crude whittling tools to help sharpen a stick for hunting, and may have observed that the stick gets hot with friction during that whittling, which might naturally lead to wondering how hot it would get if you focus on maximising the friction rather than focusing on the whittling. Different solutions like this will have been variously invented from time to time when needed, by multiple inventors, but that would be taking place long after the use of fire as a beneficial tool was widespread.

What I want to know:
how many people were sick/died before they realised you can eat the stalks but not the leaves of rhubarb?
how did someone come up with the idea of bashing wheat to make flour then cooking with it?

Watching ‘Human’ on TV - if they are so certain that humans started in Africa why aren’t we all black? How can we go from being black to Scandinavian white and blonde - even after thousands of years?

and can someone explain to me (using other creatures as an example) how there were many different ‘homo’ groups but only Sapiens survived? Despite mating with other groups?

I can't answer all of these but I know about skin tone.

If you are in a very sunny climate you need a high melanin production in your cells to protect from the harmful eggects of the sun, and melanin causes darker skin tone. Evolutionary pressures would swpect for daeker skin tone

If you are far away from the equator and not getting much sun, the high melanin production is harmful because it prevents you from getting vitamin D so evolutionary pressures select for lighter skin tone.

Obviously it takes many many generations for the effect to be so large but it happens over a long timescale.

Ah thank you! That makes total sense.

someone explain to me (using other creatures as an example) how there were many different ‘homo’ groups but only Sapiens survived? Despite mating with other groups?

Um. Not really my area, but I know this is an area of contested ongoing research. Sapiens Sapiens only just about survived, according to genetic research we went through a population bottleneck at one point.

Once we were in Europe and met with the Sapiens Neanderthals the dominant theory for years was that we killed them off. I think now it’s more considered that the climate was changing and there were never very many of them anyway. The individual surviving groups slowly fell out of contact - possibly one of the ways they came to interbreed with our groups - and could not maintain their own genetic diversity, in much the same way that so many animals are now struggling as habitats break up and they can’t cross the gaps. Perhaps it’s a bit of both with the gaps between being, as now, inhabited by our humans who jealously guard the entire world as a resource only for us.

I like to think an isolated group lived on in the Himalayas giving rise to the legends of the Yeti, and that they lingered long enough perhaps in the eastern borders of Europe -the Carpathians which is one of the last strongholds for many species now - for the stories to be passed down. Somehow, no matter how many peoples have come, settled and been replaced by new invaders in Europe, those stories of cleverly crafting cave dwellers have survived… perhaps been merged into memories of hunter gathering peoples disappearing into forests as farmers spread…

Or maybe I read too much Tolkien. He was a highly gifted academic though and despite all we’re told / sold now about modern new and shiny, the 1930s world was not savage and its academics were not idiots.

Not savage or idiots in Britain. Sorry won’t let me edit again.

Probably it was know about for some time, through lightning strikes or forest fires.

At first it was probably a matter of keeping alive the flame from a forest fire and controlling it, feeding it and not being scared of it (forest fires are destructive and something usually to be scared of rather than something you want to control and use).

Probably they also discovered sparks from when you hit stones together as a possible generation method.

Also when you rub something it gets hot. Fire is hot. So if you rub sticks together enough you may get fire.

I suspect it was something that didn't take them a huge amount of time to switch on to if they were capable of holding and using tools.

Apparently you can train a chimp to make and use fire. But it is not a thing they will do spontaneously. So there is some point between a chimp and us where making, controlling and using fire becomes something that is spontaneous.

But the chimps they are teaching about fire aren't in a situation where the usefulness of fire to ward off predators is obvious, are they? It would probably be unethical to have an experiment where there was a thing that the subject chimps knew to fear, and could see was warded off by fire, and THEN see if they kindle fire spontaneously when they hear the scary thing approaching.

And then - when they have fire, learning how to extract metals from their ores using charcoal and fire.

That's another leap forward.

@HappilyUrbanTrimmer this is a great explanation, love it, thanks!

Thanks for all the fascinating replies and other ponderings, as well as the recommendations for reading materials and viewing. It’s all really fascinating stuff 🧐

Why is it too much of a coincidence? They are not just thousands of miles apart, but separated by thousands of years in time. They also have a completely different function, one as tombs the other as religious/ceremonial buildings. Plus, if you are going to pile up huge amounts of stone, a pyramid is the most stable shape to use.

Sorry, I posted before I saw your response and I have virtually duplicated it unnecessarily!

Fire itself would not be an unknown. There have always been forest fires and lightening strikes.

If you are making stone tools then you are bashing different stones together and occasionally you will see a spark.

Putting the two together is where the magic happened.