The control of fire by early humans was a turning point in the cultural aspect of human evolution. Fire provided a source of warmth, protection, improvement on.
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The meaning is clear: If the ember goes out, they will lose their ability to cook, stay warm, protect themselves from wolves—in short, to survive. The film also makes it obvious that these Neanderthals do not know how to make fire. D uring the Middle Paleolithic, roughly , to 40, years ago, when Neanderthals occupied Europe and much of western Asia, the climate included a couple of major warm periods similar to today, but was dominated by two major cold periods that included dozens of shifts between cold and very cold conditions.
Now, new fieldwork our team has done in France contradicts some long-held assumptions and shows that the film might have had it right all along. C onventional thinking has long held that our human ancestors gained control of fire—including the ability to create it—very early in prehistory, long before Neanderthals came along some , years ago.
For many researchers, this view has been supported by the discovery of a handful of sites in Africa with fire residues that are more than a million years old.
But it has also been buoyed by the simple logic of one idea: It is hard to imagine that our ancestors could have left Africa and colonized the higher, and often much colder, latitudes of Europe and Asia without fire. T he Neanderthals, after all, lived in Europe during multiple periods in which seasonal temperatures were similar to those that exist today in northern Sweden. Northern Europe was covered in massive ice sheets during those periods.
There were vast, frigid grasslands populated by herds of reindeer, horses, and woolly mammoths. Fire would have allowed Neanderthals to cook those animals, making the meat easier to chew and more nutritious. And, perhaps more importantly, it would have helped the Neanderthals stay warm during the coldest periods.
T his line of thought is the basis for the long-prevailing notion that our ability to make fire began long before the Neanderthals, as a spark—a single technological discovery that spread widely and quickly and has remained essential to human life, in an uninterrupted line, to the present day. Chimpanzees cannot make fire but they clearly understand its behavior.
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W e surmise that during the first stage, our ancestors were able to interact safely with fire; in other words, instead of simply running from it, they had become familiar with how it works. Pruetz has found that chimps clearly understand the behavior of fire enough to have lost the fear of it that most animals typically possess.
In fact, Pruetz has observed chimps monitoring the progress of a passing wildfire from a few meters away and then moving in to forage in the burned-out area. So while chimps cannot build or contain fires, they understand how fire moves across the landscape, and they use this knowledge to their benefit.
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It is not hard to imagine a similar scenario playing out among small groups of our own early ancestors, perhaps the australopithecines, who lived from around 4 million years ago until about 2 million years ago in East Africa. The first stage may have persisted throughout much of prehistory. T he second stage would be when people could actually control fire—meaning they could capture it, contain it, and supply it with fuel to keep it going within their living areas—but they were still obtaining it from natural sources like forest fires.
It is difficult to establish when this stage occurred, for a couple of reasons. One is that some claims for very old fires were simply incorrect. For example, at the famous Chinese site Zhoukoudian, what were originally thought to be the remains of ,year-old Homo erectus fires turned out to be natural sediments resembling charcoal and ash. S econd, and perhaps most crucial, is that some of the earliest fire residues have been found in open-air settings—not inside caves—and consist of isolated fragments, small scatters of burned bones, or patches of discolored sediments.
While it is possible that these residues are the remains of hominin campfires, it is equally possible, if not probable, that they were produced by naturally occurring wildfires. Every year, lightning causes tens of thousands of wildfires across Africa, Asia, and Europe. In the past, some of these would have burned the remains of hominin camps, including bones, stone tools, and sediments. In such cases, the fire residues have nothing to do with hominin occupation of the sites. Prior to this time, private fire brigades competed with one another to be the first to respond to a fire because insurance companies paid brigades to save buildings.
The first known female firefighter Molly Williams took her place with the men on the dragropes during the blizzard of and pulled the pumper to the fire through the deep snow. In , 70 percent of firefighters in the United States were volunteer. The first fire brigades in the modern sense were created in France in the early 18th century.
Greatly interested in Jan Van der Heyden's invention, he successfully demonstrated the new pumps and managed to convince the king to grant him the monopoly of making and selling "fire-preventing portable pumps" throughout the kingdom of France. In the following years, other fire brigades were created in the large French cities. Around that time appeared the current French word pompier "firefighter" , whose literal meaning is "pumper.
This was decided because people always waited until the last moment to call the fire brigades to avoid paying the fee, and it was often too late to stop fires.
From on, the French fire brigades became para-military units and received uniforms. In the use of a protective helmet for firefighters was recommended by King Louis XV , but it took many more years before the measure was actually enforced on the ground. There were no full-time paid firefighters in America until Even after the formation of paid fire companies in the United States, there were disagreements and often fights over territory.
New York City companies were famous for sending runners out to fires with a large barrel to cover the hydrant closest to the fire in advance of the engines. Napoleon Bonaparte , drawing from the century-old experience of the gardes-pompes , is generally attributed as creating the first "professional" firefighters, known as Sapeurs-Pompiers " Sappers -Firefighters" , from the French Army.
Created under the Commandant of Engineers in , the company was organized after a fire at the ballroom in the Austrian Embassy in Paris which injured several dignitaries. In the UK, the Great Fire of London in set in motion changes which laid the foundations for organised firefighting in the future.
In the wake of the Great Fire, the City Council established the first fire insurance company, "The Fire Office", in , which employed small teams of Thames watermen as firefighters and provided them with uniforms and arm badges showing the company to which they belonged.
However, the first organised municipal fire brigade in the world was established in Edinburgh , Scotland , when the Edinburgh Fire Engine Establishment was formed in , led by James Braidwood. London followed in with the London Fire Engine Establishment. On April 1, , the Cincinnati Fire Department became the first full-time paid professional fire department in the United States, and the first in the world to use steam fire engines.
The first horse-drawn steam engine for fighting fires was invented in , but not accepted in structural firefighting until , and ignored for another two years afterwards. Internal combustion engine fire engines arrived in , built in the United States, leading to the decline and disappearance of steam engines by From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
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By starting wildfires, they were able to increase land fertility and clear large amounts of bushes and trees to make hunting easier. The early discovery of fire had numerous benefits to the early hominids. With fire, they were able to protect themselves from the terrain, and were also able to devise an entirely new way of hunting. Evidence of fire has been found in caves, suggesting that fire was used to keep the early hominids warm. This is significant, because it allowed them to migrate to cooler climates and thrive. This evidence also suggests that fire was used to clear out caves prior to living in them.
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In addition to protection from the weather, the discovery of fire allowed for innovations in hunting. Initially, early hominids used grass fires to hunt and control the population of pests in the surrounding areas. In addition to the many benefits that fire provided to early humans, it also had a major impact on the innovation of tool and weapon manufacturing.
The use of fire by early humans as an engineering tool to modify the effectiveness of their weaponry was a major technological advancement.
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Researchers further uncovered environmental evidence that indicated early humans may have been waiting in nearby vegetation that provided enough concealment for them to ambush their prey. More recent evidence dating to approximately , years ago found that early humans living in South Africa in the Middle Stone Age used fire as an engineering tool to alter the mechanical properties of the materials they used to make tools and improve their lives.
Researchers found evidence that suggests early humans applied a method of heat treatment to a fine-grained, local rock called silcrete. The evidence suggests that early humans probably used the modified tools for hunting or cutting meat from killed animals. Researchers postulate that this may have been the first time that the bow and arrow was used for hunting, an advancement that had a significant impact on how early humans may have lived, hunted, and existed as community groups.
Fire was also used in the creation of art. Scientists have discovered several small, 1 to 10 inch statues in Europe referred to as the Venus figurines. These statues date back to the Paleolithic Period and all depict nude, curvaceous women. These are some of the earliest examples of ceramics. Although it was previously thought that the advent of pottery began with the use of agriculture around 10, years ago, scientists in China discovered pottery fragments in the Xianrendong Cave that were approximately 20, years old.
These items were often carved and painted with simple linear designs and geometric shapes. Fire was an important factor in expanding and developing societies of early hominids. One impact fire had was that it caused social stratification. Those who could make and wield fire had more power than those who could not and had a higher position in society.
Another effect that the presence of fire had on hominid societies is that it required larger and larger groups to work together in order to maintain and sustain the fire. Individuals had to work together to find fuel for the fire, maintain the fire, and complete other necessary tasks. These larger groups might have included older individuals, grandparents, to help care for children.
Ultimately, fire had a significant influence on the size and social interactions of early hominid communities. The control of fire enabled important changes in human behavior, health, energy expenditure, and geographic expansion. As a result of "domesticating" fire as previously achieved with plants and animals, [ dubious — discuss ] humans were able to modify their environments to their own benefit. Evidence of more complex management to change biomes can be found as far back as , to , years ago at a minimum. Furthermore, activity was no longer restricted to daylight hours due to the use of fire.
Many of these behavioral changes can be attributed to the control of fire and its impact on daylight extension.
Control of fire by early humans
The cooking hypothesis proposes the idea that the ability to cook allowed for the brain size of hominids to increase over time. The supporting evidence of the cooking hypothesis argues that compared to the nutrients in the raw food, nutrients in cooked food are much easier to digest for hominids as shown in the research of protein ingestion from raw vs. Besides the brain, other organs in the human body also demand a high level of metabolism. Genus Homo was able to break through the limit by cooking food to lower their feeding time and be able to absorb more nutrients to accommodate the increasing need for energy.
Before the advent of fire, the hominid diet was limited to mostly plant parts composed of simple sugars and carbohydrates such as seeds, flowers, and fleshy fruits. Parts of the plant such as stems, mature leaves, enlarged roots, and tubers would have been inaccessible as a food source due to the indigestibility of raw cellulose and starch. Cooking, however, made starchy and fibrous foods edible and greatly increased the diversity of other foods available to early humans.
Toxin-containing foods including seeds and similar carbohydrate sources, such as cyanogenic glycosides found in linseed and cassava , were incorporated into their diets as cooking rendered them non-toxic. Cooking could also kill parasites , reduce the amount of energy required for chewing and digestion, and release more nutrients from plants and meat. Due to the difficulty of chewing raw meat and digesting tough proteins e. With its high caloric density and store of important nutrients, meat thus became a staple in the diet of early humans.
As a result of the increases in net energy gain from food consumption, survival and reproductive rates in hominids increased. Before their use of fire, the hominid species had large premolars which were used to chew harder foods such as large seeds. In addition, due to the shape of the molar cusps, it is inferred that the diet was more leaf or fruit—based. In response to consuming cooked foods, the molar teeth of Homo erectus had gradually shrunk, suggesting that their diet had changed from crunchier foods such as crisp root vegetables to softer cooked foods such as meat.
Today, you can see the smaller jaw volume and teeth size of humans in comparison to other primates. Due to the increased digestibility cooked foods conferred, less digestion was needed to procure the necessary nutrients. As a result, the gastrointestinal tract and organs in the digestive system decreased in size. This is in contrast to other primates, where a larger digestive tract is needed for fermentation of long carbohydrate chains.
Thus, humans evolved from the large colons and tracts that are seen in other primates to smaller ones. According to Wrangham, control of fire allowed hominids to sleep on the ground and in caves instead of trees and led to more time being spent on the ground.