14 ms·

Fire use: The first signal of widespread cultural diffusion in human evolution

67 points by harscoat 5y ago

Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
In USSR there was a very popular children book on this subject, "The adventures of a prehistoric boy" (Aventures d’un petit garçon préhistorique en France). Central plot element was mismanagement of the perpetual fire by the titular boy, which led to his banishment from his tribe, and his quest to survive and bring fire back to his people. As a child, I surely enjoyed this story and would recommend it to anyone.
- xkeysc0re 5y ago
  You might enjoy this film - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quest_for_Fire_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quest_for_Fire_(film)
  - Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
    Guy from Twin Peaks, girl from Commando, and Ron Perlman! Definitely worth checking out!
  - LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
    I laughed so hard when I watched it. So clichéd, especially the parts where the men barely managed to survive their encounter in the cave, and were the girls of the tribe comforted them as heros afterwards :-)
- danielodievich 5y ago
  I read it when I was 10 and remember it very well. Great story indeed. Thanks for a memory!
somewhereoutth 5y ago
Bad day for the rest of the animals when humans first learned to control fire. Pretty much game over.
- gogopuppygogo 5y ago
  Now we are using advancements in our control over energy resources to make it so earth is unable to sustain human life.
  - bpodgursky 5y ago
    Ah yes, that explains why there are 7.6 billion humans now.
    - lisper 5y ago
      Give it another 50-100 years.
- trhway 5y ago
  Once we learn to control antimatter it will be bad day for the Galaxy. >lead us to hypothesize that at the latest by 400,000 y ago, hominin subpopulations encountered one another often enough and were sufficiently tolerant toward one another to transmit ideas and techniques over large regions within relatively short time periods. The study suggests pretty "rosy" cultural diffusion. Would say capturing/kidnapping and forcing to divulge the secret qualify as sufficiently tolerant transmission of ideas? Imagine the smell of cooking meat coming from the other side of the valley while you're chewing on a piece of raw meat under the cold rain :) I wonder can it instead of "transmission" be that the fire-capable just out-competed the rest and dominantly spread all over the place as a result. Another possible interpretation is "genetic transmission" instead of "cultural transmission" like it is suggested for the stone tools here (while i don't agree with such hypothesis (pity as it leads to a lot of interesting conclusions, including ones about modern world), people do write scientific articles on it) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5066817/#:~:text=Acheulean%20handaxes%20were%20produced%20by,dates%20to%20about%20500%20Ka https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5066817/#:~:tex...
  - neatze 5y ago
    The myth of the peace-loving "noble savage" is persistent and pernicious. Indeed, for the last fifty years, most popular and scholarly works have agreed that prehistoric warfare was rare, harmless, unimportant, and, like smallpox, a disease of civilized societies alone. Lawrence Keeley's groundbreaking War Before Civilization offers a devastating rebuttal to such comfortable myths and debunks the notion that warfare was introduced to primitive societies through contact with civilization (an idea he denounces as "the pacification of the past").[1] [1] https://www.amazon.com/War-Before-Civilization-Peaceful-Savage/dp/0195119126 https://www.amazon.com/War-Before-Civilization-Peaceful-Sava...
pratik661 5y ago
Fire and agriculture fundamentally changed human evolution to the point where most humans won’t survive without fire or agriculture
biren34 5y ago
I think one of the most profound intellectual insights I've had is that the myth of Prometheus was in a sense true, but described events so old--that we wouldn't event consider the "people" in the myth (the ones who received the gift of fire) as human. It made me realize just how much of everything I have and know is inherited, and why traditional cultures revere their elders so. Especially when the world changes as slow as it used to, your elder taught you everything that mattered, and everything that mattered was handed down across millennia.
- c54 5y ago
  Expanding from fire a bit, and stretching the idea of culture from what we think of it as now to something more like learned group behavior, this gets us to Jungian ideas about the collective unconscious. We today have myths and patterns revealed by the stories we tell in cultures across the world which are older than Homo Sapiens and maybe even older than Primates entirely. People say our collective myths about dragons--flying fire breathing serpents--come from some ancient amalgamation of innate fear of large birds (which would have been predators to small mammals from which we evolved) combined with fear of snakes and other reptiles (same), and all with a healthy dash of the danger and power of fire. We've been social animals living in (albeit small) social groups for 10s of millions of years with all sorts of accoutrements including functioning hierarchies, acting in ways suited to our environments, knowledge to be able to find food and raise young and so on. For reference here, homo sapiens is from about 200kya, diverged from our closest relatives (chimps/bonobos) about 8000kya, and primates have been around for 80000kya. And that's just primates. This stuff is crazy old, unfathomably old.
  - sharikone 5y ago
    > People say our collective myths about dragons--flying fire breathing serpents--come from some ancient amalgamation of innate fear of large birds (which would have been predators to small mammals from which we evolved) combined with fear of snakes and other reptiles (same), and all with a healthy dash of the danger and power of fire. Or just dinosaur skeletons laying around and boys trying to impress
  - 5y ago
bobsmooth 5y ago
So fire was the first meme?
ardit33 5y ago
As mentioned in another comment, Quest for Fire is a great film that tries to explain exactly this. It follows the path of a group of Neanderthals in Paleolithic Europe (80,000 years ago), that try to tame fire, and their contact with homo-sapiens and other humanoid species. It is outdated/inaccurate, given our today's knowledge, but We know The authors tried to do as much justice as they could, given the knowledge of the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quest_for_Fire_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quest_for_Fire_(film) It was one of those slow but very captivating movies of the era. Movies like this (both indy feel and very high quality), are just are not made anymore.
- singularity2001 5y ago
  which parts are outdated/inaccurate? Wiki mentions the mixture of different levels of advancement, which might be a good point modulo Sentinelese
  - ardit33 5y ago
    Neanderthals are portrait as bit too primitive, and we know now that they were fully capable of speech, and not just grunts... "Neanderthals possessed a modern vocal tract and were therefore capable of fully modern speech."

67 points by harscoat 5y ago

In USSR there was a very popular children book on this subject, "The adventures of a prehistoric boy" (Aventures d’un petit garçon préhistorique en France). Central plot element was mismanagement of the perpetual fire by the titular boy, which led to his banishment from his tribe, and his quest to survive and bring fire back to his people. As a child, I surely enjoyed this story and would recommend it to anyone.

xkeysc0re 5y ago
You might enjoy this film - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quest_for_Fire_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quest_for_Fire_(film)
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
  Guy from Twin Peaks, girl from Commando, and Ron Perlman! Definitely worth checking out!
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
  I laughed so hard when I watched it. So clichéd, especially the parts where the men barely managed to survive their encounter in the cave, and were the girls of the tribe comforted them as heros afterwards :-)
danielodievich 5y ago
I read it when I was 10 and remember it very well. Great story indeed. Thanks for a memory!

somewhereoutth 5y ago

Bad day for the rest of the animals when humans first learned to control fire. Pretty much game over.

gogopuppygogo 5y ago
Now we are using advancements in our control over energy resources to make it so earth is unable to sustain human life.
- bpodgursky 5y ago
  Ah yes, that explains why there are 7.6 billion humans now.
  - lisper 5y ago
    Give it another 50-100 years.
trhway 5y ago
Once we learn to control antimatter it will be bad day for the Galaxy. >lead us to hypothesize that at the latest by 400,000 y ago, hominin subpopulations encountered one another often enough and were sufficiently tolerant toward one another to transmit ideas and techniques over large regions within relatively short time periods. The study suggests pretty "rosy" cultural diffusion. Would say capturing/kidnapping and forcing to divulge the secret qualify as sufficiently tolerant transmission of ideas? Imagine the smell of cooking meat coming from the other side of the valley while you're chewing on a piece of raw meat under the cold rain :) I wonder can it instead of "transmission" be that the fire-capable just out-competed the rest and dominantly spread all over the place as a result. Another possible interpretation is "genetic transmission" instead of "cultural transmission" like it is suggested for the stone tools here (while i don't agree with such hypothesis (pity as it leads to a lot of interesting conclusions, including ones about modern world), people do write scientific articles on it) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5066817/#:~:text=Acheulean%20handaxes%20were%20produced%20by,dates%20to%20about%20500%20Ka https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5066817/#:~:tex...
- neatze 5y ago
  The myth of the peace-loving "noble savage" is persistent and pernicious. Indeed, for the last fifty years, most popular and scholarly works have agreed that prehistoric warfare was rare, harmless, unimportant, and, like smallpox, a disease of civilized societies alone. Lawrence Keeley's groundbreaking War Before Civilization offers a devastating rebuttal to such comfortable myths and debunks the notion that warfare was introduced to primitive societies through contact with civilization (an idea he denounces as "the pacification of the past").[1] [1] https://www.amazon.com/War-Before-Civilization-Peaceful-Savage/dp/0195119126 https://www.amazon.com/War-Before-Civilization-Peaceful-Sava...

pratik661 5y ago

Fire and agriculture fundamentally changed human evolution to the point where most humans won’t survive without fire or agriculture

biren34 5y ago

I think one of the most profound intellectual insights I've had is that the myth of Prometheus was in a sense true, but described events so old--that we wouldn't event consider the "people" in the myth (the ones who received the gift of fire) as human. It made me realize just how much of everything I have and know is inherited, and why traditional cultures revere their elders so. Especially when the world changes as slow as it used to, your elder taught you everything that mattered, and everything that mattered was handed down across millennia.

c54 5y ago
Expanding from fire a bit, and stretching the idea of culture from what we think of it as now to something more like learned group behavior, this gets us to Jungian ideas about the collective unconscious. We today have myths and patterns revealed by the stories we tell in cultures across the world which are older than Homo Sapiens and maybe even older than Primates entirely. People say our collective myths about dragons--flying fire breathing serpents--come from some ancient amalgamation of innate fear of large birds (which would have been predators to small mammals from which we evolved) combined with fear of snakes and other reptiles (same), and all with a healthy dash of the danger and power of fire. We've been social animals living in (albeit small) social groups for 10s of millions of years with all sorts of accoutrements including functioning hierarchies, acting in ways suited to our environments, knowledge to be able to find food and raise young and so on. For reference here, homo sapiens is from about 200kya, diverged from our closest relatives (chimps/bonobos) about 8000kya, and primates have been around for 80000kya. And that's just primates. This stuff is crazy old, unfathomably old.
- sharikone 5y ago
  > People say our collective myths about dragons--flying fire breathing serpents--come from some ancient amalgamation of innate fear of large birds (which would have been predators to small mammals from which we evolved) combined with fear of snakes and other reptiles (same), and all with a healthy dash of the danger and power of fire. Or just dinosaur skeletons laying around and boys trying to impress
- 5y ago

bobsmooth 5y ago

So fire was the first meme?

ardit33 5y ago

As mentioned in another comment, Quest for Fire is a great film that tries to explain exactly this. It follows the path of a group of Neanderthals in Paleolithic Europe (80,000 years ago), that try to tame fire, and their contact with homo-sapiens and other humanoid species. It is outdated/inaccurate, given our today's knowledge, but We know The authors tried to do as much justice as they could, given the knowledge of the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quest_for_Fire_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quest_for_Fire_(film) It was one of those slow but very captivating movies of the era. Movies like this (both indy feel and very high quality), are just are not made anymore.

singularity2001 5y ago
which parts are outdated/inaccurate? Wiki mentions the mixture of different levels of advancement, which might be a good point modulo Sentinelese
- ardit33 5y ago
  Neanderthals are portrait as bit too primitive, and we know now that they were fully capable of speech, and not just grunts... "Neanderthals possessed a modern vocal tract and were therefore capable of fully modern speech."