The discovery of fire by humans: a long and convoluted process

Abstract

Numbers of animal species react to the natural phenomenon of fire, but only humans have learnt to control it and to make it at will. Natural fires caused overwhelmingly by lightning are highly evident on many landscapes. Birds such as hawks, and some other predators, are alert to opportunities to catch animals including invertebrates disturbed by such fires and similar benefits are likely to underlie the first human involvements with fires. Early hominins would undoubtedly have been aware of such fires, as are savanna chimpanzees in the present. Rather than as an event, the discovery of fire use may be seen as a set of processes happening over the long term. Eventually, fire became embedded in human behaviour, so that it is involved in almost all advanced technologies. Fire has also influenced human biology, assisting in providing the high-quality diet which has fuelled the increase in brain size through the Pleistocene. Direct evidence of early fire in archaeology remains rare, but from 1.5 Ma onward surprising numbers of sites preserve some evidence of burnt material. By the Middle Pleistocene, recognizable hearths demonstrate a social and economic focus on many sites. The evidence of archaeological sites has to be evaluated against postulates of biological models such as the ‘cooking hypothesis' or the ‘social brain’, and questions of social cooperation and the origins of language. Although much remains to be worked out, it is plain that fire control has had a major impact in the course of human evolution.This article is part of the themed issue ‘The interaction of fire and mankind’.

Global trends in wildfire and its impacts: perceptions versus realities in a changing world

“…In fire-prone ecosystems, humans have always coexisted with fire in the landscape, and its use can be seen as the first anthropogenic tool that has affected ecosystem dynamics beyond the very local scale [3]. Whether as open biomass burning or as the relatively recent practice of combusting fossil fuels in engines and power stations, fire has been a key factor in the rise of human societies [4,5]. Yet, over the past couple of centuries the traditional European perception of fire has been implemented in many parts of the world (box 1), and fire in the landscape (commonly termed wildfire, wildland fire or landscape fire) has been typically considered as 'bad' and our focus on the whole has been on eliminating or at least containing it [16][17][18].…”

Archaeological Starch

“…There is secure evidence for the controlled use of fire, which would have been essential for cooking, from around 400,000 years ago [96,97], although some evidence indicates fire may have been used over 1m years ago [98]. Humans are the only species that cook food, which is considered to have been a transformational event in human evolution [99,100].…”

A complex adaptive system may be essential for cumulative modifications in tool design

“…The high concentrations of tools and tool-associated bone damage after 1.9 Mya suggest that the species depended on technology for processing animal food (Ungar et al, 2006), as well as for extracting and/or processing plant food. Although the precise proportion of H. erectus 's diet that came from tool-assisted hunting is unknown, their heavy reliance on hunted meat is further corroborated by the archaeological evidence that hominins began to control fire during the Acheulean (Gowlett, 2016).…”