The Evolutionary Role of Fire

Introduction
Common to Animals
Development of Fire
Practical Applications of Fire
Esoteric Applications of Fire
Modern Use of Fire
Conclusion

Introduction

What separates man from the animals? Many things have, incorrectly, been sited as 'the thing that separates us from the animals'.

The belief is that some vital, singular event occured in human history that so fundamentally changed us that we were set on a new and radical evolutionary path of increasing brain size.

The thing that separates us from the animals was an event or ability so profound, that it encouraged other radical developments. From advanced language to development of art, philosophy and religion.

One thing not frequently sited as this vital ability is fire.

Let us examine the case that the fundamental thing that separates us from the animals, is our ability to start and control fire.

Common to Animals

Before discussing the case for fire, let's examine some of the things which do not separate us from the animals.

Anything which is either possessed, practised or mastered by any animal species other than man, is obviously ruled out. If these things were the vital spark that forged a new path for a species, each species possessing the ability or trait should have gone on to found civilisations.

These 'common' abilities are..

Tool use. Both chimpanzees and birds have been observed to use simple tools.
Communication/Language. Communication is not about poetry, it's about transmitting concepts and information between individuals. Both dolphins and chimpanzees have been documented as having a high ability to do so. Many animals probably have forms of communication which we do not yet understand or recognise.
Art. Some male birds make display areas from found objects in order to attract mates.
Herding and Farming. The ants beat us by 50 million years.
Building structures. Ignoring all the animals that simply burrow, still leaves the ants, termites, birds, beavers..
Awareness of self. Chimpanzees understand that an image appearing in a mirror is themselves, while squids will project a brilliant and ostentatious pattern on one side of their body to lure a mate, while displaying a dull pattern on the other side, to fool less experienced males further away. Self awareness is not so much an ability, as a state of mind - commonly cited, and therefore worthy of mention.

Development of Fire

Archealogical sites dated to 1.5 million years ago show evidence of man's use of fire, ranging from deep layers of ash and charcoal used as hearth's, bone and stone that had been altered by fire, and soils that had been fired and baked. From around 500,000 years ago, there is evidence of fire making tools, such as fire drills and fire stones.

Mankind had harnessed fire.

The ability to start and control fire is a skill unknown elsewhere in the animal kingdom, and one that changed the course of human history.

Besides being a useful and versatile tool, fire exhibits a confusing mix of elements common to both living and non-living things, and must have represented a puzzling enigma to our ancestors, staring into the flames on those chilly nights, so long ago.

Let us examine the impact and advantages that use of fire brought to early humans.

Practical Applications of Fire

Food Preparation

Boiling or charring food can reduce or kill bacteria, which both allows us to eat a wider variety of foods, as well as allowing us to eat carrion and stored food that was older.

Meat can be dried near fires, for storage, and smoked for even longer storage.

While it is best to eat fresh meat, while the nutritional content is highest, access to any meat can make the difference between life and death, when winter runs longer than usual.

Fire can extract elements out of otherwise inedible plants, or make other changes to them that make them edible or digestible.

Fire can also be used specifically to soften food. The advantages from soft food are immense. Babies who's mothers have lost their milk might be weaned to meat/vegetable broths. The sick might be able to get down a stew, while still too weak to be gnawing on a chunk of thigh charred in the fire.

The major advantage though, is to make food edible for the toothless. the loss of teeth would have presented a huge disadvantage to ancient peoples. Unable to chew food any longer, the toothless would either starve, or require another person to pre-chew the food for them - a heavy burden on the rest of the social group, and probably not an option for anyone but the most important in the tribe.

Through it's ability to soften food, fire makes it much less expensive to support and maintain the people who have lost their teeth. This in turn, might have allowed individuals to live to twice the lifespan they might typically have lived, before fire was available to soften food.

With aging people comes experience, a greater sense of history ('..the glacier covered both peaks when I was a boy, but now it only clings to one'), and a more circumspect and philosophical outlook. All these things would promote art, philosophy and religion.

Agriculture

By setting fire to the environment around them early in the growing season, the native people's of Australia created mild, light fires that turned last year's dead growth into ash. Both to fertilise and enrich this year's bounty of plant based foods, as well as increase the fodder available for their herbivorous game.

More intense fire can also be employed to promote growth of food plants, through a technique known as 'slash-and-burn' agriculture, which adds the ashen fertiliser to the soil, and opens the dense forest to sunlight, ready for planting.

Protection From Predators

Most animals avoid fire, with good reason. Prairie fires can move so fast that they overtake stampeding herds, or asphyxiate the animals with smoke. When fire gets into the canopy of forests comprising of Eucalypt trees, the oil in the leaves burns so fast it almost explodes, leading to these blazes sometimes being referred as 'fire storms' - how many natural things could be more scary than a storm of fire?

Once humans learned to control fire, it was common to keep a fire going - for a variety of reasons. One advantage was that it kept most other animals, many of which found humans to be delicious, at bay.

Hunting Prey

Once we had learned that fire can scare animals 'away', it was only a short intuitive leap to realise that it might be used to make animals move in directions of our choosing.

Fire can be used to drive animals towards traps or ambushes, or to stampede an entire herd off a sheer cliff. Early humans are believed to have used fire to drive groups of mammoths to their deaths, for their harvesting and use.

Fire is therefore, a powerful hunting weapon.

Material Processing

Sharpening a stick into a spear is possible using sandstone, but it becomes a lot easier using a fire to singe the end of the stick. Fire, water, an adze and a brain can transform a log into a canoe.
Application of heat and steam enables us to bend wood. Snow shoes, boats, waterproof wooden containers and many other useful items are possible, or far improved, with the ability to bend wood.
Hooves can be turned into glue by boiling them down in water.
Hides held over a smoky fire gain a protective coating that resists becoming stiff after the hide is wetted. Hides can also be made water resistant by rubbing tallow into them, which is fat rendered in simmering water.
Flint processed in fire gets a finer grain and becomes easier to work. More sophisticated and complicated tools are possible using heat-treated flint.
Charcoal is a cleaner burning form of wood that packs a greater energy per weight - also useful to settle stomachs and scrub teeth clean.
Metals with a low melting point can be smelted using a camp fire (most metal smelting requires special fuels and a forced air furnace - a good deal hotter than is possible in a camp fire, though kiln's are beginning to reach the temperature range needed for most metals).
Ceramics. At first used largely for figurines (probably of a philosophical or religious nature), we eventually developed ceramics for use as vessels (pots, jugs, bowls, cups..), tubes, tiles and bricks.
Glass production and glass-blowing.

Health

Plants played an important part in our pharmacopia until relatively recently*. To get at the medicines which plants can provide, fire allows us to boil or steep the plant, to bring out the volatile or resinous elements respectively, and can be used to boil down mixtures to remove the volatile elements (such as boiling down willow bark tea to get the aspirin).

Plant materials might also be smoked in order to relieve conditions particular to the lungs.

Fire can be used to help prevent infections by sterilising tools used to work on wounds (either by direct application, or by quenching in steam or boiling water) and materials used to patch wounds (tendons used for stitches, etc.) or protect the healing area (hides, hay, etc.).

* In fact, the argument can be made that plants still play an important part in our pharmacopia. E.G. Consider that aspirin was extracted as the active ingredient of the bark of the Willow tree - the production of aspirin might now be done in vats of chemicals - but we got both the idea and the formula from the plant.

Chemistry

The application of fire vastly expanded our ability to separate, mix, alter and purify - and thereby investigate and explore - the nature of the physical matter that surrounds us.

Although it would not be called such until much later, the study of the matter around us represents the beginnings of chemistry.

There were many other chemical reactions known to ancient peoples that were made possible thanks to fire, innovations such as..

Melted tallow combined with leeched wood-ash produces soap.
Quicklime can be produced by burning limestone pounded to dust.

Warmth

Without fire to melt ice to water and provide warmth, our ancestors could not have colonised areas affected by glaciation.

Warm people also require less food, as they burn less calories to keep warm.

Another aspect to warm food is the 'energy content' that the food gains from heating, which might be considered as part of the overall 'calorific content' of the food itself.

Perhaps surprisingly, this heat energy is usually negligible in comparison to the calorific content, generally comprising no more than 1-2% of the total energy. On the other hand, warm food also warms the diner, so we come back to the advantage that a warm person burns less calories, and can get by with less food!

Esoteric Applications of Fire

As powerful and useful a tool as fire constitutes, it is perhaps ironic that it is the more esoteric aspects of fire that had the single greatest effect on humans.

Art

Cave Paintings

A cave painting of animals and hunting stories can have an astonishing effect on the viewer, especially when the art is difficult to access, as a lot of caves are.

Deep and/or inaccessible caves were possibly the preferred location for such art, for a number of reasons. A deep cave offers..

Resistance to destruction from natural forces such as rain, mudslides, or forest fires.

While caves that are difficult to access provide..

Resistance from destruction from humans, whether due to vandalism, fear of the meaning of the images or the images themselves, or different religious beliefs.
The 'specialness' factor. People generally appreciate a painting of an ancient hunt, or 'dream vision' - much more, after crawling through a constricted tunnel on their stomach for an hour or more, just to reach it!

However, art in all darkened caves would not have been practical before fire. In dark caves, fire provides the light needed to render the images, as well as the light needed to view them.

Ceramic Figurines

Besides images painted in minerals on cave walls, there were a few other ways to represent items of significance, notably carvings. A carving might be made of wood - susceptible to rotting or termites, or bone, which can be burnt. Although it is possible to make likenesses from stone, stone is very difficult to work when confined to tools made from bone, wood and stone.

The development of ceramics offered another way to render likenesses, and although the end result was brittle and prone to shatter, it offered protection from water, insect attack, fire, flood and most other calamity. It offered most of the advantages of stone, while being much easier to shape and form.

Ancient Art

It is important to realise that while likenesses on walls or in carvings might have seemed powerful to the original artists, and even more so to those who were not skilled in the arts, the power and mystery of the art increases over time.

First they are images by the forefathers, then of the ancients, until finally their origins are lost in the mists of time, and any that behold them tend to ascribe them to the spirits themselves.

By making such long lasting artistic likenesses, the pool of ancient and powerful art would have increased significantly, to amaze, astonish and frighten later peoples into wonderring about the messages contained therein, and what those messages meant for their own lives.

Philosophy

Fire must have seemed magical to ancient humans, even today, the Zorastrans revere the 'living flame', and fire is used at many important ceremonies in other religions.

Perhaps in its aspect of the 'living flame' or spirit, it became central to the funerary rites of many tribes of North American Indians, the Saxons, the Neandertal and a slew of other peoples widely dispersed across the globe and the eons.

But what is fire? A fire can start seemingly from nothing, but once started it grows and moves, it breathes and it can 'die'. The question of whether fire itself is a living thing must have occupied the minds of people for millenia, and it possibly inspired or tied in with the development of the first religions themselves.

Before man's conquest of fire, the setting of the sun meant a time of cold and dark - about the only thing to do was huddle under the furs until morning.

With fire, man had both light and warmth well into the night, and it was therefore practical to sit around the camp fire telling stories, or talking about plans for their hunting and gathering expeditions, or philosophising.

Religion

We struggle to explain the seemingly random nature of the world that surrounds us. We attempt to ascribe meaning to the terrific events such as earthquakes, floods and famines that shape, and sometimes end, our lives.

The innate desire to understand these forces stems from our survival instinct.

If we can understand the signs that an earthquake is imminent, we can ensure we are on a wide, flat plain when it hits, rather than in forest in a mountainous area.
The ability to predict a severe flood would give warning to head for high ground in time to escape the rising waters.
A pending famine might encourage potential parents to hold off bringing 'more mouths into the world', and encourage storing extra food.

Since such powerful events seemed out of our immediate control, we searched for any way or mechanism to allow us to alter the bad parts of these patterns, and maintain the good.

Lacking anything better, we ascribed control of these events to mystical beings, and made offerings to those entities to intercede on our behalf.

But where do we get a 'belief system'? How do we develop one?

Shamans

Throughout history, mankind has more often been prey, than predator. Lacking substantial claws or fangs, our natural defenses are weak, countered only by our clever use of weapons to protect ourselves, and most importantly, our communal nature.

One human is an easy target for predators, especially when sleeping, meditating or injured. But two or more humans become a dangerous quarry.

On the other hand, communal living has it's costs. Each individual is forced to constantly account for, and accomodate, the needs of others - there is very little time which a person can have to themselves, undisturbed.

Communal living promotes neither introspection, nor deep meditation.

A shaman with a fire, however, can spend periods of time alone - away from main tribe, in relative safety and comfort. If the holy person retreats to a secluded cave, the fire provides warmth & light. If done in the open, fire provides both warmth and protection from predators.

It is difficult to calculate the advantages that temporary separation from the tribe might bring. Not only is a person more free to try unconventional things that might result in quizzical looks from the other tribe members, but the sheer lack of distractions from the other members can foster meditation and contemplation on a far deeper level.

Aided by any variety of materials intended to foster lateral thought (such as mind-altering herbs and roots), the Shamans had the opportunity to investigate some of the deepest mysteries of existence.

By providing Shaman's with the safety and security to spend time alone, fire contributed greatly to our pool of esoteric thought.

Summary on Fire and Religion

Fire provided humankind with

A fascinating dilemna in it's own right.
The ability to make long lasting images in caves and representations in ceramic objects.
Elderly people more prone to introspection
The light and warmth to allow us to sit up to all hours talking, and
..the ability to spend time alone, seeking greater truths.

All these things are powerful forces for forging belief systems, and thereby developing religions.

Modern Use of Fire

Even in the modern age, when fire has been largely dispelled from the hearth with the plethora of other heating devices available (toasters, electric ovens, microwave ovens..), it still lies at the heart of most power stations that feed those heating devices.

Steam engines were largely responsible for the industrial revolution, and while steam engines have now faded into obscurity, they have been replaced by internal combustion engines, or jet, or rocket engines - all of which rely on fire for their operation.

The majority of our chemical and material processing is reliant on application of fire.

Most modern religions have ceremonies in which fire is an element, if not a central theme.

Conclusion

Fire provides many practical advantages as well as the security and time to ponder greater mysteries. Control of fire, with all the advantages it brought, was the vital element that led humankind on a new path.

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