
Why Fire Makes Us Human - onuralp
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/why-fire-makes-us-human-72989884/?no-ist
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danielam
I once came across a curious anthropological account of the importance of fire
is a section in Feliks Koneczny's book "On the Plurality of Civilizations"[0]
written in the 1930s. (The OCR or transcription isn't great, but the text is
still able to be read.) Others might find it interesting.

[0] [https://www.scribd.com/doc/4464979/ON-THE-PLURALITY-OF-
CIVIL...](https://www.scribd.com/doc/4464979/ON-THE-PLURALITY-OF-
CIVILIZATIONS-Feliks-Koneczny-Entire-Book#page=49)

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igravious
From, uh, 2013.

And the book, _Catching Fire_ , mentioned in the article and from which most
of the info is gleaned is from 2010. The scholar in the article, Richard
Wrangham, wrote the book.

 _Sapiens_ by Yuval Noah Harari doesn't push the domestication of fire as far
back as 1.8 million years as Wrangham does but it does note that the
chimpanzee brain uses 6% of the body's energy at rest, while according to the
article "A human body at rest devotes roughly one-fifth of its energy to the
brain". The hypothesis is that only cooking could have provided this boost.
Shorter gut, bigger brain. It's a fascinating conjecture. The question is, did
we develop sophisticated language before domesticating fire or vice-versa.
Perhaps the synthesised creation myths of all the world's cultures and
religions could provide a clue?

~~~
thijser
Regarding the timescale this is about, what does it matter that the article is
5 years old?

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igravious
Only that normally we put the year in the title of the post like this (2013)
so that people know it's a few years old. That's all, not that the info is out
of date or anything.

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abrowne
Which is useful if, like me, you guessed whose work this was going to be about
(I took an anthro class in college with one of his former grad students) and
hoped it would be a follow-up, not the same book.

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robotsquidward
I loved this article. Stories like this make me feel a weirdly intense
connection with everyone. One thing we can all have in common is our
evolutionary history and how it made us the beings we are, flaws and all.

~~~
blackflame7000
It makes you wonder why humans are so much more special than every other
species. In only a few hundred thousand years we evolved far beyond a
threshold that no species has managed to achieve in the years, and for some,
eons of evolution proceeding.

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triangleman
Loren Eiseley also focused on the anthropology of fire. This is from the
1950's:

[https://carrieshmarrie.weebly.com/blog/man-the-firemaker-
by-...](https://carrieshmarrie.weebly.com/blog/man-the-firemaker-by-loren-
eiseley)

also the same thing in a Google Books link:
[https://books.google.com/books?id=Bg2-Clxqy88C&lpg=PA45&ots=...](https://books.google.com/books?id=Bg2-Clxqy88C&lpg=PA45&ots=TBV97a_PBn&pg=PA45#v=onepage&f=false)

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buovjaga
Fermentation is another naturally-occurring thing that has been used by humans
to prepare food since forever. I think it is myopic to focus on fire.

~~~
beat
Fire substantially predates fermentation, though. We were already benefiting
from fire-cooked food long before the rise of conscious fermentation.

Besides that, fermentation at scale, for pickling, beer, or bread, requires
containers - which are a product of ceramics, which is a product of fire.
Fermentation as a humanity-changing technology is inseparable from fire that
way.

~~~
buovjaga
Ceramics? People have fermented food in seal skin:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiviak](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiviak)

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Symmetry
I'm currently reading _Why We Sleep_ and just finished a chapter on how
humans' ancestors came out of the trees and started sleeping on the ground.
It's speculated that early humans' use of fire made this non-suicidal -
keeping away the big nocturnal predators and also reducing the number of
ticks, etc, preying on them.

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stronglikedan
Tangential, but I've also heard that humans are the only animal that will
willingly run _towards_ a fire.

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kqr2
Some insects are attracted to flames:

[https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129035...](https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=12903572)

~~~
stronglikedan
Gah! Forgot about those. Maybe because I hate them. I'm sure there was some
type of cognitive bias at play.

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truculation
Cooking helped us to fuel our large brains. May we turn it around and ask: for
a given diet and brain size, is the adaptive value of curiosity/creativity to
save on calories? Not just by improving our plans, tools and behaviours but by
making thinking itself more efficient (in terms of simple wattage).

