Humans and Fire

 "In “Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States,” James C. Scott, a professor of political science at Yale, presents a plausible contender for the most important piece of technology in the history of man. It is a technology so old that it predates Homo sapiens and instead should be credited to our ancestor Homo erectus. That technology is fire. We have used it in two crucial, defining ways. The first and the most obvious of these is cooking. As Richard Wrangham has argued in his book “Catching Fire,” our ability to cook allows us to extract more energy from the food we eat, and also to eat a far wider range of foods. Our closest animal relative, the chimpanzee, has a colon three times as large as ours, because its diet of raw food is so much harder to digest. The extra caloric value we get from cooked food allowed us to develop our big brains, which absorb roughly a fifth of the energy we consume, as opposed to less than a tenth for most mammals’ brains. That difference is what has made us the dominant species on the planet." ("The Case Against Civilization" in The New Yorker, Sept 2017)

"Fire changed everything. Anthropologists don’t know precisely how humans first marshaled fire for their use roughly 1 million years ago, but it’s obvious how fire formed humans. By softening meat and vegetables, fire predigests our food, allowing us to eat and retain more calories in less time. By warding off predators, fire allowed our ancestors to climb down from their tree beds and sleep soundly on the ground; more REM sleep sharpened their memory and their focus. Fire also allowed humans to grow huge, energy-greedy brains that gobble up about a fifth of our calories, a far greater proportion than other primates’ brains consume. By expanding our minds and our free time, fire sparked humankind’s capacity for boredom, amusement, craftsmanship, and art. And from what we can discern, our Homo sapiens ancestors celebrated the gift of free time with gusto." ("How Civilization Broke Our Brains" in The Atlantic, Dec 2020)