November 17, 2016 • 46 mins
Humans existed before their mastery of fire, albeit in a rather primitive state -- and yes, even Earth itself knew an age when fire itself was not only scarce, but chemically impossible. In this two-part episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe venture back to a time before the flame and consider the curious, interconnected ascension of man and fire. In part two, consider how fire enabled the evolutionary and technological ascent of humanity.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from housetop works
dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick in.
Today is going to be part two of a two
part episode about the scientific history of fire on Earth. Earth,
(00:23):
as we learned in our last episode, probably as far
as we know, the only place in the universe there
is fire. Could be other places we don't know about,
but here it is, right. Yeah, there are three elements
required for for fire. You need the fuel, you need
the heat, you need the oxygen, the tri force of fire,
the tri force of fire. Earth didn't always have it,
but then the conditions coalesced to where they were available,
(00:45):
and then we had fire. And furthermore, fire, as far
as we can tell, is an essential component of high technology. Yes,
so you're talking about you know, creating, you know, smelting ors,
creating settle towards metal tools. All of this requires that
the alchemy of these creations requires fire. So it is
(01:07):
very much clear that fire is an essential part of
the technological profile of the human species on Earth, you know,
beyond stone tools. Fire is how we get stuff done.
But there are I mean it has symbolic power too.
I mean we get in the whole idea of Promethean fire,
like it's this thing that God has brought us. It
is the power of power that is from beyond us
(01:29):
that then fills us up. We talk about the fire
and the spark of human existence, of the soul of compassion,
all of these of these complex ideas are are are
wound up in this notion of fire. Yeah. And so
the first thing I think we should talk about today
is is this concept of the divine spark, not so
(01:49):
much in the theological sense, but in the literal sense,
Like what what is the human brain look like on fire?
What what is the fire drug done for us? And
I think it's been long recognized that that control mastery
over fire is one of the essential ingredients in the
human animal as it exists today. One of there are
(02:10):
things that really makes a stand apart um alongside language. Right,
if you had to pick just two things that really
make humans different than all the other animals, give me
fire and give me some words to talk about fire with,
right to to say while we're setting you on fire. Yeah,
But even and this idea goes back a long way
so Charles Darwin wrote in The Descent of Man in
(02:32):
eight quote the speaking of Humankind quote, he has discovered
the art of making fire, by which hard and stringy
roots can be rendered digestible and poisonous roots or herbs innocuous.
This discovery of fire probably the greatest ever made by man,
accepting language, dates from before the dawn of history. I
(02:53):
think we can all agree on that, right, fire comes
before history. But exactly how long before history? And one
thing you might be surprised to learn is that this
is not a settled question. Exactly when fire emerges in
human history is still up for debate. Yeah. The predictions
vary from a brown from a near forty thousand years
(03:15):
ago to four hundred thousand, five hundred thousand, or even
in the in the very extreme cases one point six. Yeah,
and so they're all over the map. I looked at
one paper by A. J. A. J. Gaulet, who is
an anthropologist and archaeologists called the discovery of fire by
humans a long and convoluted process in philosophical Transation Transactions
(03:38):
of the Royal Society b from sixteen and he looks
over a lot of the evidence and says so much
archaeological investigation into the emergence of fire has been very
focused on the search for hearths, right, this is this
is the big thing you want to find as evidence
of of hominins using fire, is these fireplaces. Hearths a
(03:58):
place where you put all your fuel together and you'd
burn it. Evidence for hearts seems to appear around zero
point seven to zero point four million years ago, or
I guess we could just say four hundred thousand, seven
hundred thousand years ago, But that's not necessarily the earliest
emergence of fire use among humans. That's just when we
start finding these fireplaces. In fact, evidence of burning, Galllet
(04:22):
says appears at archaeological sites starting around one point five
million years ago. But it's it's kind of difficult because
just using fire doesn't necessarily always leave good evidence that
can be found, you know, more than a million years later,
So you really have to be on the lookout for
things that are difficult to find, and they might not
(04:43):
always leave a trace at all. Yeah, Like as with
a lot of things in the fossil record, in the
archaeological record, it's kind of a crap shoot as to
whether it's actually going to be preserved and then if
it's preserved, it's going to be discovered. Right. But so
Galllet says that, you know, one way to think about
it might be that it's not just that we had
fire and then we didn't. But there's sort of a
three stage process for the human acquisition of fire. And
(05:06):
uh so Gallant says, first, what about fire foraging? So
fire foraging is is an interesting first step in the
acquisition of fire because it doesn't require the control of fire,
just an attraction to it. So what would you have
in mind if you hear the words fire foraging? You're
going around looking for fire, not exactly your or you
(05:29):
might be following fire around, but instead you go to
a place where a wildfire has burned, and then you
gain the chance for a bonus of free resources. I
kind of think about it how like if you're ever
in a video game like Legend of Zelda, and you
go around and you like burn a bunch of bushes
or something, and then under the bushes there might be
(05:50):
some rupees or some goodies something to find there. This
is kind of what that is like. So you go
to a place where wildfire is burning and there might
be bird eggs or rodents or lizards or other small
animals exposed that you can eat, and it might also
render these So it renders these resources more visible obviously
because it eliminates cover easier to obtain and possibly also
(06:13):
more digestible by accidental cooking. But there's a reason that
early humans and and hominids would have been drawn to
a blaze. They would have seen the smoke on the
horizon really through some sort of wildfire scenario going on,
and they would have sought it out from sources. Yeah. Yeah,
And we can talk about some modern analogies to how
these these creatures may have uh felt about fire by
(06:35):
looking at some some modern primates today, but we'll talk
about that later in the episode. And just for analogies
in non human animals in nature, there are other animals
that do this there, for example, birds that are known
as fire followers. You know, fire foraging among avians makes
it seem like it could easily have been done by
hominins a long time ago too. But then so Gablet
(06:57):
also says, you know, you've got a couple of stages
after fire foraging. You've got he says, quote social slash
domestic hearth, fire for protection and cooking. Okay, so you
have a fire that you can gather around, there's warmth,
there's light, and there is there's heat for cooking food.
And then third, finally, fires used as tools in the
(07:19):
technological processes like firing pottery or making metal tools or
things like that are creating a you know, adhesives on
things that take fire to make. But I think that
thing about fire foraging is an interesting first step because
it sort of shows you how you could maybe bridge
the gap between a primate species that doesn't understand anything
(07:42):
about fire and one that starts to use fire. You know,
you don't have to go just straight from being afraid
of fire to using it. Technologically, you sort of have
this bridge, right, a behavioral bridge from one to the other. Yeah.
One is tempted to make an analogy to the taming
of a wild animal. At first, you know, you know
what it is, you learn, you learn to be a
(08:03):
little more comfortable around it, you know what kind of
distance to give it, uh, how much space needs to
be between you and the animal. And then eventually you
get to the point where you have worked out a
relationship with the animal, you have tamed it, and that's
sort of what happens with fire over time. So you
can imagine going from simply seeking out the fire, keeping
a distance from the fire because you know that even
(08:23):
though it it unwraps these resources for you, it itself
is hot and burns you. And then over time you
become comfortable enough with it to start playing with a
little bit, sticking sticks into it, and then eventually even
capturing portions of it and figuring out ways to utilize it.
This is an interesting thing to think about. Commonly, it
is very common. I bet you listening right now have this,
(08:47):
have had this experience. It is extremely common for humans
to want to play with fire. I I know, I
feel this feeling like there's a there's a campfire, and
you just feel this urge to kind of like poke
at it with a stick or something. That I had
this experience with my my son recently at a a
fall celebration with some family. Uh, they had a camp
(09:07):
fire set up and we had some sticks with marshmallows,
and you know, instructed him on how to cook the marshmallow.
But then I at the end of it, I said,
now you can just poke the stick around in the fire,
because I know that's really having been a little boy myself,
and still having that little boy within me. I know
that that's really what we want to do. We don't
want to cook the marshmallows so much as we're going
to just poke the ever loving hell out of that fire,
(09:30):
you know, and watch the sparks rise up and watch
coal's collapse and that, I mean, that's the experience. But
I feel like this is something that's not just like
a like a cognitively obtained behavior like using an an
Excel spreadsheet might be. It feels instinctual, right, and it
certainly does to me. I think you would report if
small children seem to do it without prompting. There's this
(09:53):
this instinctual draw to play with fire. Why on earth
would that be an instinct? I mean, instinct is generally
something that has been selected for by evolution, So why
would evolution favor this instinct to go mess around with
something that could burn you or even kill you unless
there's some kind of compensating benefit, And it seems like
for humans there probably has been, right because you compared
(10:16):
it to taming an animal. We haven't just tamed an animal,
we have tamed a demon. Right, Yeah, one is it
wants them to think of the gin that has a
fire that like a genie that one has has captured
and and and enslaved for your own purposes. Pretty much
with the fire demon in uh Was, which was the
Miyazaki movie with the fire demon not spirited away but
(10:39):
how's moving castle? Oh yeah, I remember that one. Yeah,
I think that's that's a good fire demon. It's a
good fire demon. Yeah, and they put him to work.
But it but it also, like a gin, grants your wishes, right,
So let's let's take a moment to think about some
of the wishes that have been granted by the demon fire. Um.
Some of these we've touched on already. If we called on,
do we have to phrase them in a way that
they can't come back to it? Us? Um No, because
(11:02):
fire does come back to bite if there's no there's
no avoiding that make me a cheese sentimatech So, first
of all, the ability to cast light upon an uncertain,
frightening and death filled night. Yeah, I mean think back
to I think of this anytime around the campfire. Just
think of like the primordial environment. You're huddled around this light,
this heat source, and then it's gives you the ability
(11:23):
to cast light on a world it's full of dangers,
human dangers as well as predators, as well as just
the problem of you tripping over a root and dying
in the night and then being consumed by predators. One
thing is, without fire, you can just pretty much bet
that humans would not exist at certain latitudes, right right, Yeah.
(11:45):
Fire gives us the ability to warm ourselves in increasingly
colder environments, so you're no longer forced to range south
in the winter or to stick to natural refuges of
thermal springs. That's uh, that's something that I remember coming up,
been studying saunas before. Like the long history of our
association with with geothermal vents is that like these were
(12:06):
these were little uh redoubts of of heat and civilization
that early people could could range between. Interesting. But with fire,
you can create your own little redoubt of warmth anywhere
you want to, uh, in a in an increasingly chilly environment. Now,
a big one to come back to that cheese sandwich,
(12:27):
you mentioned the ability to externalize human digestion through the
use of cooking. Like, that's that's one way I like
to think of of of cooking, you know, because it's
more than just oh, I put some char in this cheese,
and now it's it's what's wonderful, and it is wonderful,
But it goes far beyond that. Cooking makes char on cheese?
Is that wonderful char on steak? Don't? Well? Maybe not char.
(12:50):
You've had cheese sticks, right, and you know where the
cheese comes off, the grilled cheese, and it kind of
hardens into this you know what, I doubted you, but
now I know you know what, You're tough. That's that's delicious. However,
it doesn't really break down like the core benefits of
cooking fairly man, because a lot of those come down
to meat. Uh. Cooking meat makes it easier to digest,
(13:10):
It reduces the cost of meat digestion. Just coming at
it from you know, an economic bio energy standpoint, It
compromises the structural integrity of the tissue by gelatinizing the collagen.
Cooking also cleanses foods. It destroys parasites, pathogens, and even
renders many natural toxins harmless. Poison fruits become foods, etcetera. Okay.
(13:32):
On top of this, fire enables the transformation of resources
such as raw or into weapons, which can then be
used for your hunt. Uh. Fire eventually fuel the Industrial Revolution.
The burning of fossil fuels propelled us into the modern age,
into the space age. Even so, if if man looms
large uh in a in a grand scheme of things,
(13:52):
it's because the demon fire stands about behind it, casting
a shadow across the world and beyond, as Rocky Aerrison
would say, and for the fire demon. Yeah. And so
one particular aspect of what you just talked about I
want to look at is cooking, cooking as a feature
of the history and development of the human species. So
(14:15):
there is a Harvard primatologist named Richard Wrangham and also
a Harvard biologist Rachel Carmody, and they've put forward this
interesting hypothesis I was reading about about how cooking by
way of harnessing of fire made us into the humans
we are today. And so this is not considered proven.
(14:35):
There are arguments made against it, but I think it's
really interesting and worth taking a look at. So how
could cooking make us into the creatures we are today?
Especially from a mental point of view. Well, one thing
to think about is how your body at a total
state of rest is just a vampire. It is absolutely
energy ravenous, and I think sometimes people don't realize how
(14:59):
much energy is burned just by being alive, just by
the steady processes like circulation, digestion, and homeostasis. So I
put together an example just to illustrate how much energy
this takes comparatively, uh, and I used a couple of
calorie counters provided by the Mayo Clinic and Runners World
websites with you know, so take this with the warning
(15:19):
that these types of apps offer sort of general estimates
shouldn't be taken as perfect or exact, but based on
this imagine you are a thirty year old female who
is five ft six and weighs a hundred and forty
five pounds. You burn a hundred about seventeen fifty calories
a day at rest, one thousand and seven fifty calories
doing nothing. If you just lie in bed and watch
(15:41):
what would you watch all day? A very low energy
thing to watch on TV? I don't know, Buffy watching Buffy.
Just watch Buffy all day. Now, to burn that same
amount of energy through exercise, a hundred and forty five
pound adult would have to run about sixteen miles at
a pace of six miles per hour. The entire time.
(16:01):
That's more than half of a marathon race. So I
don't know, it just doesn't seem like laying there watching
Buffy all day is about the same amount of energy
work as running more than half of a marathon. But
it is. Yeah, It's kind of like when you look
at like business expenses and look at the sheer costs
of just keeping the lights on the overhead, the overhead
(16:22):
of a picul of business, the overhead for business human
is uh is pretty staggering. Yeah, and so what are
what where is all that energy going? Well, it's like
we said, it powers a lot of different things that
power circulation, digestion, respiration. But one of the most energy
hungry organs in the human body, maybe the most energy
(16:44):
hungry I've seen different claims about that, UH is the brain.
So despite being only a very small percentage of the
average human body weight, I think I've seen some like
two percent or so, it regularly uses around a fifth
of the body's total available metabolic energy. Of twenty of
all the energy your body uses is going to the brain.
(17:04):
I'll lighten up those synapses, things going back and forth.
And according to one study I read from n each
unit of brain tissue. So that's unit by mass uses
about twenty two times the amount of metabolic energy that
is used by the equivalent amount of muscle tissue. Being
smart is very costly from an energy perspective, and we
(17:28):
know that all organisms live in a very tight energy economy. Right, Yeah,
there's not a lot, there's not room for a lot
of wasted effort or even any wasted effort really when
it comes to an organism. Right. Uh, so we know now,
we know that the brain needs a large amount of
energy in order to be powerful and formidable and intelligent,
(17:49):
like a big primate brain is. But if you go
back a few decades, scientists noticed this curious fact. So
they said, when you look across species with varying rates
of what's called encephalization, meaning you know, investing evolutionarily in
a large, powerful brain blowing the head up, incephalized mammals
(18:10):
don't seem to show a corresponding increase in their basal
metabolic rate. So you make a bigger brain, but you're
in you're investing in this energy hungry organ but you're
not showing greater energy needs than a similar sized animal
that doesn't invest in encephalization. So for a for a comparison,
it's kind of like if you have two families that
(18:32):
live next door to one another, and you know they
both have the same income, and suddenly one of the
families buys a yacht. So you're kind of thinking, how
where did that want for that? Yeah, what's this other
line of revenue that is that is enabling them to
make this purchase? Right, So, there was a big influential
paper in nineteen that offered a potential solution to this,
(18:53):
a hypothesis to explain this, and it was known as
the expensive tissue hypothesis. This was by A. Leslie C. I.
L Oh and Peter Wheeler in Current Anthropology. And so
what they said is one way you could pay for
the brain would be to cut investments in other quote
expensive organs, such as the gut. Right, So, a powerful,
(19:17):
costly digestive system is required if you want to get
the maximum energy out of bad food. Essentially, so if
you've got raw, tough, hard to digest, low quality foods,
you need a big, powerful gut to get all the
energy out of them. But if you can imagine an
organism could convert most of its diet away from all
(19:41):
of that junk into high quality, high nutrition, easy to
digest foods. Then it could cut what it invests in
the gut and the digestive system, and I'll and get
cut down that budget and invest all of those savings
into the brain. So the original proponents of the expensive
tissue hypothesis, they were focused on meat to Their idea
(20:02):
is that you know, these hominins converted a large part
of their diet from tough, hard to digest plant matter
over to meat and animal products, and they could get
more nutrition with less work for the digestive system. I
can imagine that the TV advertisement for for meat at
the time. Yea more bang for your bite, get smart
quick with meat. Right. It sounds like a fallout kind
(20:25):
of yeah. But so here's where Rangum and Carmody, That
where their hypothesis comes in. What if instead of just
upgrading to meat, what if one of the significant upgrades
was too cooked food, allowing for easier digestion and a
bigger brain. So about one point seven million years ago
(20:45):
or so, about the time of the emergence of Homo erectus,
when the modern human body plan first shows up. This
is when you see human bodies that are shaped more
or less like Homo sapiens are today cooking Under this
hypod this is could have entered the scene, making difficult foods,
tough roots and tubers and stuff available on the open
(21:06):
savannah into a digestible, a real thing that you could
digest and get good energy from as long as you
could cook it. Now, I said that this hypothesis was
not fully accepted everywhere, and that's the case. So from
what I'm reading more research has seriously called into question
many aspects of our previous understanding of the expensive tissue hypothesis.
(21:29):
There appears to be a period of right now conflicting
evidence and reinterpretation. Just doing a search for scientific articles
published within the last four years or so, I found
a bunch claiming to find evidence for the expensive tissue
hypothesis within certain species or groups of animals, others claiming
not to find any evidence within certain species or groups. So,
(21:49):
as far as I can tell, this one is up
in the air. Um And with respect to the cooking hypothesis,
one important piece of evidence would be that in order
to sort of track within cephalization history with the growing
brains of our hominid ancestors, it would need to be
supported by evidence of very early fire use in hominids.
(22:09):
Now earlier, what did we say was the earliest known
fire use. We saw those hearths, you know, four hundred thousand,
seven hundred thousand years ago or so, we saw maybe
evidence of burning going back earlier, maybe to one point
five million years ago or something like that. But this
would need to show fire use going way way back
earlier than is generally accepted. But I would also say
(22:32):
within the realm of possibility, maybe maybe you degree based
on what we've read, well, I think the Yeah, their
arguments on both sides that are interesting. One that I
ran across just to base it in, like a very
simple study from two thousand seven in which the researchers
studied effects of cooking and also grinding the meals of
a Burmese python. So they found that just cooking the
(22:52):
meat and these beef, just cooking the beef alone decreased
the cost of digestion absorption and assimilation by twelve point
seven percent. Grinding it decreased it by twelve point four percent,
for a total culinary discount of twenty three point for
four percent. Okay, so they've externalized some of the digestion
of this cow for a Burmese python, right, and certainly
(23:14):
you know Burmese pythons to not to cook on their own,
but but probably right, well yeah, I mean, you know,
except maybe in the story books. But but yeah, this
is the interesting thing about this is that on one
handed sort of backs backs up these ideas of yes,
there's a there is a deaf and definite evolutionary advantage
in cooking meat, but it's in looking back, like the
(23:36):
history of of culinary arts and culinary preparation, if you
can't really discount the grinding, the the the the dissimilation
of food as well like being able to break foods
down into not only cooking them into forms that are
more palpable and more consumable, but also just physically altering them.
(23:59):
And and I can't help but think of of the
use of fire and therefore smoke as a as a
as a food preservation technique as well, being able to
smoke your food so that you have that nutritional power
up for later, uh, perhaps in a time when when
they're when resources are less available. So I think I
(24:21):
think it becomes a more complex pattern as you see
culinary practices evolve within early people. Yeah, that's that's not
kind of take on it anyway. Well, I mean another
thing to think about though, this is, uh, this is
probably not super scientific, but just to check your own reflections.
As long as we're talking about human nature, we asked
this about poking fire. How often do you really just
(24:43):
want to eat all your food raw? Is that a
desire you have or do you feel a deep instinctual
desire for cooked food? Well? Not fruit, I'm I'm I'm
rather I have to be talked into say cooking pineapple fruit.
Fruit is often the exception, right, that's often the exception
given to this statement that humans tend to prefer cooked foods,
(25:05):
and humans in fact aren't the only animals that seem
to prefer cooked foods. In fact, I found one study
from actually from also in Proceedings of the Royal Society
be called Cognitive Capacities for Cooking and Chimpanzees. And so
one of the things they talked about in this study
is they said, okay, so we've got chimpanzees, and we
(25:27):
found out across nine studies that chimpanzees prefer cooked food.
They like to cook food better than raw food. They
also found that the Chimpanzees can understand that raw food
is transformed into cooked food through cooking, and so they
can sort of generalize this understanding and other context They
can get the point that if I have a piece
(25:47):
of raw food, cooking can turn it into cooked food.
They also will wait for cooked food. They will delay
gratification if the reward is the food being cooked. They
will give uper all food in order to see it
transformed into cooked food. And they can transport and save
or all food in anticipation of future cooking. So I
(26:10):
don't know that that seems to to go along with
this sort of instinctual thing that I think we all
feel and that I think has been found in other
animals too, that you don't just get more out of
digestion when food is cooked, but you have this natural
preference for it. Yeah, and certainly that's that matches up
with human experience. We have this primal relationship with with cooking.
(26:31):
We want to cook our food, I mean, we have
Michael Pollen in particular has a number of means. He's
written and produced documentaries that touch on this time and
time again. We have this this kind of inborn desire
to want to manipulate our foods via cooking, transform them
into these other forms. And when that, when those techniques,
(26:54):
when those practices leave our lives, we we we feel
drawn to h to commune with him another way, such
as watching a cooking shows all the time, that sort
of thing, you know. Speaking of Michael Paul and I
one of the articles I read about the cooking hypothesis,
and this was from a few years ago, so he
might have changed his mind since then, but at the
time of the article he said that he was he
(27:14):
felt pretty convinced by the cooking hypothesis, this hypothesis that
cooking is sort of an evolved biological trait that coincides
with greater incphilization or investment in brain tissue in humans. Yeah,
like I said, I think there's a strong case to
be made there. So earlier I mentioned that paper by
Galllet about the history of acquiring fire by by humans,
(27:36):
and he's the one who talked about the fire foraging bridge,
and he mentions one way that that might play into
the cooking hypothesis that I think is interesting. So I
just want to read a section from his worker. He says,
quote the analogy with other animals might suggest that in
the first instance, early hominins would go to fires simply
to take advantage of any additional opportunities of gaining prey,
(27:59):
regardless of what are the resources were cooked. For example,
the fire might reveal a clutch of eggs, so much
better if it has baked them. Uh that would that
technically be baked if the shell is still on. I
don't know. That seems kind of gross, but I've never
really done that before. Maybe, yeah, I mean, I don't know.
It would be kind of like a boiled egg. I guess, right,
(28:19):
I don't know. I've never seen it on the menu
baked eggs, but I've never seen it in the shell
on the menu. Yeah, well except in a boiled egg, right, yeah,
but not but not like over an open flame. Interesting, somehow,
it seems like it would explode. I don't know why
I think that. Well, that's an experiment for some of
our listeners to fill us in about, or that's an
experiment for us to do on Facebook Live right here
(28:41):
in the office. Open fire. But yeah, so anyway, gallet
continues quote for insevilization. New cranial finds are altering the
figures rapidly, but at the moment it would seem that
the average cranial capacity for early Homo at one point
eight million years ago, and so that's starring, you know,
close to the time of the emergence of Homorectus is
(29:03):
six hundred to six hundred and fifty cubic centimeters, which
is forty two greater than for most apes and australiopithesnes
other related animals at the time. And yet this is
earlier than Richard Rangham's postulated date of one point seven
million years ago for applying the cooking hypothesis. And then
(29:23):
he concludes saying, perhaps the fire foraging is one important
element and the cooking hypothesis comes into play more strongly later,
but other factors operate alongside both. So this is talking
about how these the fire foraging and the cooking hypothesis,
if they're both, you know, correct models of of the
history of humanity, how they sort of could fit together.
(29:45):
They're like a jigsaw puzzle that led to the fire.
I want to say, the fire regime that usually is
another meaning that the fire regime within the command of
human power and technology, and then the rest is history. Alright,
We're gonna take a quick break and when we come back,
we're going to discuss us what it means to get fire.
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about hb X dot com slash how stuff Works. All right,
we're back now. We all know what it means to
get fired, but we don't necessarily often think about what
it means to get fired. Do you ever really think
about this, Robert like to get it to sort of
understand what the deal with fire is. If I were
(31:11):
to take my dog up to a big bond fire,
I don't think he really understands how fire works. I
don't know. I mean, maybe I'm not giving him enough credit,
but I don't know what you think about that. I
feel like the ability to sort of get fired just
basically get a sense of, Okay, here's what you can
expect a fire to do, here's you know. Here, here's
(31:35):
what you don't have to worry about. Here's what you
do have to worry about in the presence of fire.
That's not something animals usually tend to seem to understand. Yeah,
I'm not convinced that my cat understands fire. And this
is often one of the distinctions made between humans and
other tool using animals is that humans are the only
organisms on Earth that you know, of course, know how
(31:56):
to use and control fire. Animals are often surprisingly clever,
but their reaction to fire can be sort of characterized
mostly by avoidance behaviors, and if not just by avoidance behaviors.
There are some animals that might approach fire to try
to find pray or something. They do seem to be
purely reactive right that they're they're just acting on instinct.
(32:18):
Most animals tend to avoid or flee fire or even
the sound of fire. And it's been shown that elephants
become distressed and released stress hormones in response to wildfire.
But some research published in two thousand and ten by
Jill Pruittz and Thomas Leduke I thought was very interesting
in this regard because they observed savannah chimpanzees. So these
(32:40):
are chimpanzees living on the savannah lands pan troglodites various
in Fongoli Synegal, and they recorded their reactions during these
two encounters with wildfires in March and April two thousand six.
So you've got these savannah chimpanzees, they're living out on
the plane is there in the shrub land, and and
(33:02):
a wildfire comes along, and the researchers right that during
these two encounters, the chimpanzees, unlike many other animals, reacted
pretty much totally calmly in the presence of fire, and
they would loiter near the edge of the fire and
groom themselves they'd be, you know, a few meters away
from the fire. They go fishing for termites, they'd eat
(33:23):
some saba fruit even as smoke from the fire was
coming up to block the sunlight, or maybe climbing a
tree they've just been resting in a few minutes before.
And they said that, you know, the chimps would move
to stay out of the path of the fire as
it traveled. Uh. And these brush brush fires came at
the end of the dry season, so there's plenty of
dry fuel all around, and the fires can travel actually
(33:45):
rather quickly, But the chimps just didn't panic. Instead, they
seemed to be totally confident in predicting the movements of
the fire and thus avoiding it. Uh. And this doesn't
mean they have an understanding of the chemistry of fire,
but to some ex then it requires that they have
this kind of unspoken, rudimentary understanding of how fire works.
(34:06):
For instance, that it requires fuel to burn right, that
if you get out of the way of maybe a
connecting line between the fire and some other piece of fuel,
it's not going to come towards you. And also that
its movement can be predicted by things like the direction
and speed of the wind and of course the location
of the available fuel. So, in other words, it seemed
(34:28):
like the chimps were conceptualizing fire. These chimpanzees were basically
showing that they understand how fire works, like an environmental
understanding of fire, and they knew how to give it
an appropriate distance. They knew how to get out of
its way but without panic. Though they certainly fall short
of being able to exploit it in any real way,
(34:51):
shape or form. Right, But they might not be as
far off as you would imagine, because so the researchers
set up sort of three steps they hypothesized for master fire,
and the first is the step that they think that
the chimpanzees have already mastered. Right. The first step is
the conceptualization of fire, and they characterize this as an
understanding of the behavior under varying conditions that would allow
(35:14):
one to predict fire's movement, thus permitting activity in close
proximity to the fire. Then, of course, the second step
is the ability to control fire, and this would involve
containing it, providing or depriving the fire of fuel, and
the ability to put it out. And then third, finally,
would be the ability to start a fire on your own,
(35:35):
so conceptualization, control, and then starting at yourself. Right, So
if we buy into this three step process, you can
see that the chimps already seemed to be at step one.
And what it would require for them to start gaining
mastery over fire is they wouldn't necessarily already know have
to know how to start a fire. I mean that's
sort of advanced, difficult knowledge. But imagine if they could
(35:58):
just start to figure out that, Hey, if I get
some of this fire on a stick and wave it around,
I can really scare off predators. Yeah, I mean, it's
the basic Mogli scenario right, exactly enough, the tigers your
Cohn with the with the burning branch. But that to
me does not actually seem all that implausible as chimp behavior.
I mean, that seems basically within primate tool use capability
(36:21):
already using tools using sticks, Like what's the difference between
poking a stick uh into a log to obtain termites
versus sticking a stick into an active fire to obtain
just a piece of its power? And they do seem
to respect its power in another interesting way. So Prue
It's speaking to Iowa State News about her research, was
(36:44):
describing a thing that she observed, which was a fire
dance being performed by one of the males of these chimpanzees.
So she says, quote, chimps everywhere have what's called a
rain dance. Jane Goodall, a famed primatologists, coined that term,
and it's just big male display to show dominance. Males
display all the time for a number of different reasons,
(37:05):
but when there's a big thunderstorm approaching, they do this
really exaggerated display. It's almost like slow motion. And when
I was with this one party of chimps, the dominant
male did the same sort of thing, but it was
towards the fire, so I call it a fire dance.
She also reports that she heard what seemed to her
to be a unique vocalization that was made at the
(37:29):
approaching fire that maybe in some way linked to, you know,
like maybe a fire signal. And it's interesting too that
there's this connection to with thunder that a thunderstorm and
and a fire and the like. Is if there there's
some connection there that is perceived ever so out, ever
so foggily. The primates mind these powerful energetic forces of
(37:52):
nature that you can sort of understand and be calm around,
but you you also have to respect their power. Uh.
And so there's also you can look this up online
if you want. There's some videos of the chimps around
the edge of the fire, and it's the fire is
burning through the brush and you can see them just
sort of lazing around, grooming, hanging out while this brush
(38:12):
fire smolders a few meters away. It's pretty strange to see.
But this also makes me wonder what underlies the ability
of an organism to control fire, you know, so, like,
what are the first steps? And it makes me think
that the first prerequisite to an organism that's about to
gain fire control or fire technology is probably just overcoming
(38:35):
much older instinctual fire fire behaviors, which are avoidance behaviors
and escape behaviors. Generally animals want to get away from fire.
To control fire, you have to approach it and you
have to remain near it. And I don't know, so
that seems it's like there's this sort of suicidal first
step on the road to the greatest unleashing of technological
(38:59):
capability that could happen for an animal on earth. Yeah,
and then you have to steal a portion of it,
and then you have to contain it. You almost kind
of have to kind of a domestication of the flame, yea,
so conceptualization, the ability to control it may be sequestered
in a hearth. But then of course that third step
is the ability to start a fire. And then and
(39:21):
it's it's interesting to just look at how pervasive that is,
even though a lot of us would be kind of
thrown for a loop if we had to produce it
without tools or instruments. But basically every human society can
produce fire basically. They're interestingly enough, there are some and
I have to say they're some of these claims are dubious. Uh,
there's some some controversy about these. But there have been
(39:42):
claims that you have Aboriginal people of Tasmania as well
as the Sentinalise people of the Adaman Islands. This is
a south eastern part of the Bay of bengal Um.
There have been claims that these are the only native
peoples who have survived into the nineteenth century without possessing
the knowledge of fire creation and instead had to you know,
(40:05):
quote unquote keep the fire burning, preserving lightning born embers,
perhaps in hollowed out trees like so they had to
keep it in the cage and not let it go out.
According to these According to these allegations are that they
have to we have to catch it. That's not the
Promethean idea, like Prometheus gave it, gave us this fire,
he didn't tell us how to make it, so store
it somewhere nights, like in a hollowed out lock. This
(40:25):
strikes me as one of those things that could easily
be one of those sort of wrong racist colonial discussions. Yeah,
because you know, to what extent there's also sort of
a modern longing for like that primal existence, I think.
But also they have the possibility for for racist attitudes
of these You know, these savages clearly don't have the
mastery of fire. They can only find it and then
(40:47):
carry it around. Um, it would seem based on the
research I was looking at, you could make a stronger
case for the Sentinalese people. Uh, but it seems to
remain an open question. It's it's worth noting that maintaining fire,
carrying embers from one place to another, for instance, might
not be such a weird thing to do in an
extremely wet tropical environment that limits your access to dry,
(41:10):
combustible materials, right, So like if you've always got fuel available, Yeah, um,
well you might. Even if you knew how to start
a fire, it might always be easier to just keep
one burning. So what's the point? Yeah, I mean, if
anyone is ever even if you've just stayed in a
cabin and maintained a fire in the hearth to keep warm,
you know, you know, it can be kind of a
pain in the butt to see, even if you've got matches,
(41:33):
Even if you've got matches and lighter fluid and all
the rigamarole, sometimes it's easier just to keep some portion
of a fire hot, keep the coals warm, uh, inactive
long enough to reignite it later. That doesn't mean you
don't know how to make fire, but sometimes it's the
most expedient course. Well, now that I think about it,
I know that's what I do. I mean, if I
were out in the wilderness, I always try to keep
(41:54):
something on fire instead of instead of wanting to have
to restart it every time. Yeah, I mean, I think
back on the voice out methods of you know, the
flint and or using a little little bow method that
I never could get to work, or using a crystal
I gotta say, I think that bow method you're talking about,
the one where you get the get the stick in
the string, yes, and you roll it back and forth
(42:16):
to create fire through friction with the wood on wood. Yeah,
that's my My position is that that is a scam
that nobody's ever actually done that. Uh, if you've seen
video of it, I think it's it's made with Hollywood magic.
I think I don't believe in it. Yeah, it's certainly
it would seem like it would be easier to keep
that the ambers going as opposed to doing that. But anyway,
(42:38):
that's that's our that's our take on it. Anyway, maybe
I'm just speaking out of bitterness from my childhood something
I tried and failed at many times. So as long
as we're talking about fire in the human brain, I
also did want to throw in one thing that I
thought was kind of interesting. It's just a metaphor. But
so people are always trying to come up with physical
metaphors to explain the nature of conscious us. You know,
(43:01):
what is consciousness? It's like it's one of the big
mysteries left out there. There are a lot of big mysteries,
I guess in science, but consciousness is one of the
thorniest of them because it's inherently subjective. You're essentially saying,
what can be the explanation for the existence of subjectivity?
Why aren't we all just automata with no experience? And
(43:21):
so you've got these people who would say, well, we're
we're panpsychists, right, and we believe that all matter is
in some way conscious, at least in some really rudimentary way,
that consciousness is an inherent property of objects. And then
on the other hand, you've got like the physicist Max Tegmark,
who has proposed that consciousness is a state of matter
(43:41):
like solid or liquid or gas. You know, at some
point matter arranges itself into some kind of information processing state,
and this is like a new state of matter. Uh.
And then some have also proposed that consciousness, though it's
it's not that it's nonphysical, it's based on physical reality,
is not a physical object or a physical quantity, but
(44:03):
it's rather a process. It's more like consciousness is not
the ball or the bat or the player, but the
game of baseball being played. And uh. And another way
to think about it in that sense would be that
consciousness could be kind of like fire. Yeah, since that
you know, fire isn't so much the substance, but it
(44:25):
is the interaction of things happening to chemical reaction. What
is consciousness but a slow motion explosion somedays more than others.
But yeah, I think that's a that's a valid point. Yeah,
in the same sense that the gases and the oxygen
and the fuel are not themselves fire, but they are
reacting to create fire, to to create this thing that
(44:47):
we call fire. Maybe all the you know, the cells
in your brain are not consciousness, but that they generate this, uh,
this combined property, this event we think of as consciousness,
and that we experience his consciousness. Just a weird thing
to think about. Well, on that note, Joe, I'd like
to end this episode in the this this pair of
(45:08):
episodes with a quote from one of one of my
favorite books, and I know you appreciate this one as well,
Coran McCarthy's The Road. It's also one of my favorite books. There.
There's a common motif in the book, uh that when
I first read it, I admit I didn't fully understand
what was going on when they were talking, when the
characters were talking about this, but they the main characters
(45:30):
are a father, and a son. It takes place in
a cold and dying world after the collapse of civilization
and technology. But the father and the son often speak
about carrying the fire. Indeed, so here's the quote, and
I'll leave this for everyone to contemplate. You have to
carry the fire. I don't know how to. Yes, you do.
(45:51):
Is the fire real? The fire? Yes it is? Where
is it? I don't know where it is. Yes, you do.
It's inside you. It always was there. I can see
it all right, everybody. If you would like to get
(46:12):
in touch with us, you can find us stuff to
Blow your Mind dot com. You'll find the podcast episodes there,
you'll find the blog posts, you'll find videos, and you'll
find links out to various social media accounts such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram,
Tumbler and the like. And if you'd like to spread
the fire to us, you can reach us by email
at blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from housetop works
dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick in.
Today is going to be part two of a two
part episode about the scientific history of fire on Earth. Earth,
(00:23):
as we learned in our last episode, probably as far
as we know, the only place in the universe there
is fire. Could be other places we don't know about,
but here it is, right. Yeah, there are three elements
required for for fire. You need the fuel, you need
the heat, you need the oxygen, the tri force of fire,
the tri force of fire. Earth didn't always have it,
but then the conditions coalesced to where they were available,
(00:45):
and then we had fire. And furthermore, fire, as far
as we can tell, is an essential component of high technology. Yes,
so you're talking about you know, creating, you know, smelting ors,
creating settle towards metal tools. All of this requires that
the alchemy of these creations requires fire. So it is
(01:07):
very much clear that fire is an essential part of
the technological profile of the human species on Earth, you know,
beyond stone tools. Fire is how we get stuff done.
But there are I mean it has symbolic power too.
I mean we get in the whole idea of Promethean fire,
like it's this thing that God has brought us. It
is the power of power that is from beyond us
(01:29):
that then fills us up. We talk about the fire
and the spark of human existence, of the soul of compassion,
all of these of these complex ideas are are are
wound up in this notion of fire. Yeah. And so
the first thing I think we should talk about today
is is this concept of the divine spark, not so
(01:49):
much in the theological sense, but in the literal sense,
Like what what is the human brain look like on fire?
What what is the fire drug done for us? And
I think it's been long recognized that that control mastery
over fire is one of the essential ingredients in the
human animal as it exists today. One of there are
(02:10):
things that really makes a stand apart um alongside language. Right,
if you had to pick just two things that really
make humans different than all the other animals, give me
fire and give me some words to talk about fire with,
right to to say while we're setting you on fire. Yeah,
But even and this idea goes back a long way
so Charles Darwin wrote in The Descent of Man in
(02:32):
eight quote the speaking of Humankind quote, he has discovered
the art of making fire, by which hard and stringy
roots can be rendered digestible and poisonous roots or herbs innocuous.
This discovery of fire probably the greatest ever made by man,
accepting language, dates from before the dawn of history. I
(02:53):
think we can all agree on that, right, fire comes
before history. But exactly how long before history? And one
thing you might be surprised to learn is that this
is not a settled question. Exactly when fire emerges in
human history is still up for debate. Yeah. The predictions
vary from a brown from a near forty thousand years
(03:15):
ago to four hundred thousand, five hundred thousand, or even
in the in the very extreme cases one point six. Yeah,
and so they're all over the map. I looked at
one paper by A. J. A. J. Gaulet, who is
an anthropologist and archaeologists called the discovery of fire by
humans a long and convoluted process in philosophical Transation Transactions
(03:38):
of the Royal Society b from sixteen and he looks
over a lot of the evidence and says so much
archaeological investigation into the emergence of fire has been very
focused on the search for hearths, right, this is this
is the big thing you want to find as evidence
of of hominins using fire, is these fireplaces. Hearths a
(03:58):
place where you put all your fuel together and you'd
burn it. Evidence for hearts seems to appear around zero
point seven to zero point four million years ago, or
I guess we could just say four hundred thousand, seven
hundred thousand years ago, But that's not necessarily the earliest
emergence of fire use among humans. That's just when we
start finding these fireplaces. In fact, evidence of burning, Galllet
(04:22):
says appears at archaeological sites starting around one point five
million years ago. But it's it's kind of difficult because
just using fire doesn't necessarily always leave good evidence that
can be found, you know, more than a million years later,
So you really have to be on the lookout for
things that are difficult to find, and they might not
(04:43):
always leave a trace at all. Yeah, Like as with
a lot of things in the fossil record, in the
archaeological record, it's kind of a crap shoot as to
whether it's actually going to be preserved and then if
it's preserved, it's going to be discovered. Right. But so
Galllet says that, you know, one way to think about
it might be that it's not just that we had
fire and then we didn't. But there's sort of a
three stage process for the human acquisition of fire. And
(05:06):
uh so Gallant says, first, what about fire foraging? So
fire foraging is is an interesting first step in the
acquisition of fire because it doesn't require the control of fire,
just an attraction to it. So what would you have
in mind if you hear the words fire foraging? You're
going around looking for fire, not exactly your or you
(05:29):
might be following fire around, but instead you go to
a place where a wildfire has burned, and then you
gain the chance for a bonus of free resources. I
kind of think about it how like if you're ever
in a video game like Legend of Zelda, and you
go around and you like burn a bunch of bushes
or something, and then under the bushes there might be
(05:50):
some rupees or some goodies something to find there. This
is kind of what that is like. So you go
to a place where wildfire is burning and there might
be bird eggs or rodents or lizards or other small
animals exposed that you can eat, and it might also
render these So it renders these resources more visible obviously
because it eliminates cover easier to obtain and possibly also
(06:13):
more digestible by accidental cooking. But there's a reason that
early humans and and hominids would have been drawn to
a blaze. They would have seen the smoke on the
horizon really through some sort of wildfire scenario going on,
and they would have sought it out from sources. Yeah. Yeah,
And we can talk about some modern analogies to how
these these creatures may have uh felt about fire by
(06:35):
looking at some some modern primates today, but we'll talk
about that later in the episode. And just for analogies
in non human animals in nature, there are other animals
that do this there, for example, birds that are known
as fire followers. You know, fire foraging among avians makes
it seem like it could easily have been done by
hominins a long time ago too. But then so Gablet
(06:57):
also says, you know, you've got a couple of stages
after fire foraging. You've got he says, quote social slash
domestic hearth, fire for protection and cooking. Okay, so you
have a fire that you can gather around, there's warmth,
there's light, and there is there's heat for cooking food.
And then third, finally, fires used as tools in the
(07:19):
technological processes like firing pottery or making metal tools or
things like that are creating a you know, adhesives on
things that take fire to make. But I think that
thing about fire foraging is an interesting first step because
it sort of shows you how you could maybe bridge
the gap between a primate species that doesn't understand anything
(07:42):
about fire and one that starts to use fire. You know,
you don't have to go just straight from being afraid
of fire to using it. Technologically, you sort of have
this bridge, right, a behavioral bridge from one to the other. Yeah.
One is tempted to make an analogy to the taming
of a wild animal. At first, you know, you know
what it is, you learn, you learn to be a
(08:03):
little more comfortable around it, you know what kind of
distance to give it, uh, how much space needs to
be between you and the animal. And then eventually you
get to the point where you have worked out a
relationship with the animal, you have tamed it, and that's
sort of what happens with fire over time. So you
can imagine going from simply seeking out the fire, keeping
a distance from the fire because you know that even
(08:23):
though it it unwraps these resources for you, it itself
is hot and burns you. And then over time you
become comfortable enough with it to start playing with a
little bit, sticking sticks into it, and then eventually even
capturing portions of it and figuring out ways to utilize it.
This is an interesting thing to think about. Commonly, it
is very common. I bet you listening right now have this,
(08:47):
have had this experience. It is extremely common for humans
to want to play with fire. I I know, I
feel this feeling like there's a there's a campfire, and
you just feel this urge to kind of like poke
at it with a stick or something. That I had
this experience with my my son recently at a a
fall celebration with some family. Uh, they had a camp
(09:07):
fire set up and we had some sticks with marshmallows,
and you know, instructed him on how to cook the marshmallow.
But then I at the end of it, I said,
now you can just poke the stick around in the fire,
because I know that's really having been a little boy myself,
and still having that little boy within me. I know
that that's really what we want to do. We don't
want to cook the marshmallows so much as we're going
to just poke the ever loving hell out of that fire,
(09:30):
you know, and watch the sparks rise up and watch
coal's collapse and that, I mean, that's the experience. But
I feel like this is something that's not just like
a like a cognitively obtained behavior like using an an
Excel spreadsheet might be. It feels instinctual, right, and it
certainly does to me. I think you would report if
small children seem to do it without prompting. There's this
(09:53):
this instinctual draw to play with fire. Why on earth
would that be an instinct? I mean, instinct is generally
something that has been selected for by evolution, So why
would evolution favor this instinct to go mess around with
something that could burn you or even kill you unless
there's some kind of compensating benefit, And it seems like
for humans there probably has been, right because you compared
(10:16):
it to taming an animal. We haven't just tamed an animal,
we have tamed a demon. Right, Yeah, one is it
wants them to think of the gin that has a
fire that like a genie that one has has captured
and and and enslaved for your own purposes. Pretty much
with the fire demon in uh Was, which was the
Miyazaki movie with the fire demon not spirited away but
(10:39):
how's moving castle? Oh yeah, I remember that one. Yeah,
I think that's that's a good fire demon. It's a
good fire demon. Yeah, and they put him to work.
But it but it also, like a gin, grants your wishes, right,
So let's let's take a moment to think about some
of the wishes that have been granted by the demon fire. Um.
Some of these we've touched on already. If we called on,
do we have to phrase them in a way that
they can't come back to it? Us? Um No, because
(11:02):
fire does come back to bite if there's no there's
no avoiding that make me a cheese sentimatech So, first
of all, the ability to cast light upon an uncertain,
frightening and death filled night. Yeah, I mean think back
to I think of this anytime around the campfire. Just
think of like the primordial environment. You're huddled around this light,
this heat source, and then it's gives you the ability
(11:23):
to cast light on a world it's full of dangers,
human dangers as well as predators, as well as just
the problem of you tripping over a root and dying
in the night and then being consumed by predators. One
thing is, without fire, you can just pretty much bet
that humans would not exist at certain latitudes, right right, Yeah.
(11:45):
Fire gives us the ability to warm ourselves in increasingly
colder environments, so you're no longer forced to range south
in the winter or to stick to natural refuges of
thermal springs. That's uh, that's something that I remember coming up,
been studying saunas before. Like the long history of our
association with with geothermal vents is that like these were
(12:06):
these were little uh redoubts of of heat and civilization
that early people could could range between. Interesting. But with fire,
you can create your own little redoubt of warmth anywhere
you want to, uh, in a in an increasingly chilly environment. Now,
a big one to come back to that cheese sandwich,
(12:27):
you mentioned the ability to externalize human digestion through the
use of cooking. Like, that's that's one way I like
to think of of of cooking, you know, because it's
more than just oh, I put some char in this cheese,
and now it's it's what's wonderful, and it is wonderful,
But it goes far beyond that. Cooking makes char on cheese?
Is that wonderful char on steak? Don't? Well? Maybe not char.
(12:50):
You've had cheese sticks, right, and you know where the
cheese comes off, the grilled cheese, and it kind of
hardens into this you know what, I doubted you, but
now I know you know what, You're tough. That's that's delicious. However,
it doesn't really break down like the core benefits of
cooking fairly man, because a lot of those come down
to meat. Uh. Cooking meat makes it easier to digest,
(13:10):
It reduces the cost of meat digestion. Just coming at
it from you know, an economic bio energy standpoint, It
compromises the structural integrity of the tissue by gelatinizing the collagen.
Cooking also cleanses foods. It destroys parasites, pathogens, and even
renders many natural toxins harmless. Poison fruits become foods, etcetera. Okay.
(13:32):
On top of this, fire enables the transformation of resources
such as raw or into weapons, which can then be
used for your hunt. Uh. Fire eventually fuel the Industrial Revolution.
The burning of fossil fuels propelled us into the modern age,
into the space age. Even so, if if man looms
large uh in a in a grand scheme of things,
(13:52):
it's because the demon fire stands about behind it, casting
a shadow across the world and beyond, as Rocky Aerrison
would say, and for the fire demon. Yeah. And so
one particular aspect of what you just talked about I
want to look at is cooking, cooking as a feature
of the history and development of the human species. So
(14:15):
there is a Harvard primatologist named Richard Wrangham and also
a Harvard biologist Rachel Carmody, and they've put forward this
interesting hypothesis I was reading about about how cooking by
way of harnessing of fire made us into the humans
we are today. And so this is not considered proven.
(14:35):
There are arguments made against it, but I think it's
really interesting and worth taking a look at. So how
could cooking make us into the creatures we are today?
Especially from a mental point of view. Well, one thing
to think about is how your body at a total
state of rest is just a vampire. It is absolutely
energy ravenous, and I think sometimes people don't realize how
(14:59):
much energy is burned just by being alive, just by
the steady processes like circulation, digestion, and homeostasis. So I
put together an example just to illustrate how much energy
this takes comparatively, uh, and I used a couple of
calorie counters provided by the Mayo Clinic and Runners World
websites with you know, so take this with the warning
(15:19):
that these types of apps offer sort of general estimates
shouldn't be taken as perfect or exact, but based on
this imagine you are a thirty year old female who
is five ft six and weighs a hundred and forty
five pounds. You burn a hundred about seventeen fifty calories
a day at rest, one thousand and seven fifty calories
doing nothing. If you just lie in bed and watch
(15:41):
what would you watch all day? A very low energy
thing to watch on TV? I don't know, Buffy watching Buffy.
Just watch Buffy all day. Now, to burn that same
amount of energy through exercise, a hundred and forty five
pound adult would have to run about sixteen miles at
a pace of six miles per hour. The entire time.
(16:01):
That's more than half of a marathon race. So I
don't know, it just doesn't seem like laying there watching
Buffy all day is about the same amount of energy
work as running more than half of a marathon. But
it is. Yeah, It's kind of like when you look
at like business expenses and look at the sheer costs
of just keeping the lights on the overhead, the overhead
(16:22):
of a picul of business, the overhead for business human
is uh is pretty staggering. Yeah, and so what are
what where is all that energy going? Well, it's like
we said, it powers a lot of different things that
power circulation, digestion, respiration. But one of the most energy
hungry organs in the human body, maybe the most energy
(16:44):
hungry I've seen different claims about that, UH is the brain.
So despite being only a very small percentage of the
average human body weight, I think I've seen some like
two percent or so, it regularly uses around a fifth
of the body's total available metabolic energy. Of twenty of
all the energy your body uses is going to the brain.
(17:04):
I'll lighten up those synapses, things going back and forth.
And according to one study I read from n each
unit of brain tissue. So that's unit by mass uses
about twenty two times the amount of metabolic energy that
is used by the equivalent amount of muscle tissue. Being
smart is very costly from an energy perspective, and we
(17:28):
know that all organisms live in a very tight energy economy. Right, Yeah,
there's not a lot, there's not room for a lot
of wasted effort or even any wasted effort really when
it comes to an organism. Right. Uh, so we know now,
we know that the brain needs a large amount of
energy in order to be powerful and formidable and intelligent,
(17:49):
like a big primate brain is. But if you go
back a few decades, scientists noticed this curious fact. So
they said, when you look across species with varying rates
of what's called encephalization, meaning you know, investing evolutionarily in
a large, powerful brain blowing the head up, incephalized mammals
(18:10):
don't seem to show a corresponding increase in their basal
metabolic rate. So you make a bigger brain, but you're
in you're investing in this energy hungry organ but you're
not showing greater energy needs than a similar sized animal
that doesn't invest in encephalization. So for a for a comparison,
it's kind of like if you have two families that
(18:32):
live next door to one another, and you know they
both have the same income, and suddenly one of the
families buys a yacht. So you're kind of thinking, how
where did that want for that? Yeah, what's this other
line of revenue that is that is enabling them to
make this purchase? Right, So, there was a big influential
paper in nineteen that offered a potential solution to this,
(18:53):
a hypothesis to explain this, and it was known as
the expensive tissue hypothesis. This was by A. Leslie C. I.
L Oh and Peter Wheeler in Current Anthropology. And so
what they said is one way you could pay for
the brain would be to cut investments in other quote
expensive organs, such as the gut. Right, So, a powerful,
(19:17):
costly digestive system is required if you want to get
the maximum energy out of bad food. Essentially, so if
you've got raw, tough, hard to digest, low quality foods,
you need a big, powerful gut to get all the
energy out of them. But if you can imagine an
organism could convert most of its diet away from all
(19:41):
of that junk into high quality, high nutrition, easy to
digest foods. Then it could cut what it invests in
the gut and the digestive system, and I'll and get
cut down that budget and invest all of those savings
into the brain. So the original proponents of the expensive
tissue hypothesis, they were focused on meat to Their idea
(20:02):
is that you know, these hominins converted a large part
of their diet from tough, hard to digest plant matter
over to meat and animal products, and they could get
more nutrition with less work for the digestive system. I
can imagine that the TV advertisement for for meat at
the time. Yea more bang for your bite, get smart
quick with meat. Right. It sounds like a fallout kind
(20:25):
of yeah. But so here's where Rangum and Carmody, That
where their hypothesis comes in. What if instead of just
upgrading to meat, what if one of the significant upgrades
was too cooked food, allowing for easier digestion and a
bigger brain. So about one point seven million years ago
(20:45):
or so, about the time of the emergence of Homo erectus,
when the modern human body plan first shows up. This
is when you see human bodies that are shaped more
or less like Homo sapiens are today cooking Under this
hypod this is could have entered the scene, making difficult foods,
tough roots and tubers and stuff available on the open
(21:06):
savannah into a digestible, a real thing that you could
digest and get good energy from as long as you
could cook it. Now, I said that this hypothesis was
not fully accepted everywhere, and that's the case. So from
what I'm reading more research has seriously called into question
many aspects of our previous understanding of the expensive tissue hypothesis.
(21:29):
There appears to be a period of right now conflicting
evidence and reinterpretation. Just doing a search for scientific articles
published within the last four years or so, I found
a bunch claiming to find evidence for the expensive tissue
hypothesis within certain species or groups of animals, others claiming
not to find any evidence within certain species or groups. So,
(21:49):
as far as I can tell, this one is up
in the air. Um And with respect to the cooking hypothesis,
one important piece of evidence would be that in order
to sort of track within cephalization history with the growing
brains of our hominid ancestors, it would need to be
supported by evidence of very early fire use in hominids.
(22:09):
Now earlier, what did we say was the earliest known
fire use. We saw those hearths, you know, four hundred thousand,
seven hundred thousand years ago or so, we saw maybe
evidence of burning going back earlier, maybe to one point
five million years ago or something like that. But this
would need to show fire use going way way back
earlier than is generally accepted. But I would also say
(22:32):
within the realm of possibility, maybe maybe you degree based
on what we've read, well, I think the Yeah, their
arguments on both sides that are interesting. One that I
ran across just to base it in, like a very
simple study from two thousand seven in which the researchers
studied effects of cooking and also grinding the meals of
a Burmese python. So they found that just cooking the
(22:52):
meat and these beef, just cooking the beef alone decreased
the cost of digestion absorption and assimilation by twelve point
seven percent. Grinding it decreased it by twelve point four percent,
for a total culinary discount of twenty three point for
four percent. Okay, so they've externalized some of the digestion
of this cow for a Burmese python, right, and certainly
(23:14):
you know Burmese pythons to not to cook on their own,
but but probably right, well yeah, I mean, you know,
except maybe in the story books. But but yeah, this
is the interesting thing about this is that on one
handed sort of backs backs up these ideas of yes,
there's a there is a deaf and definite evolutionary advantage
in cooking meat, but it's in looking back, like the
(23:36):
history of of culinary arts and culinary preparation, if you
can't really discount the grinding, the the the the dissimilation
of food as well like being able to break foods
down into not only cooking them into forms that are
more palpable and more consumable, but also just physically altering them.
(23:59):
And and I can't help but think of of the
use of fire and therefore smoke as a as a
as a food preservation technique as well, being able to
smoke your food so that you have that nutritional power
up for later, uh, perhaps in a time when when
they're when resources are less available. So I think I
(24:21):
think it becomes a more complex pattern as you see
culinary practices evolve within early people. Yeah, that's that's not
kind of take on it anyway. Well, I mean another
thing to think about though, this is, uh, this is
probably not super scientific, but just to check your own reflections.
As long as we're talking about human nature, we asked
this about poking fire. How often do you really just
(24:43):
want to eat all your food raw? Is that a
desire you have or do you feel a deep instinctual
desire for cooked food? Well? Not fruit, I'm I'm I'm
rather I have to be talked into say cooking pineapple fruit.
Fruit is often the exception, right, that's often the exception
given to this statement that humans tend to prefer cooked foods,
(25:05):
and humans in fact aren't the only animals that seem
to prefer cooked foods. In fact, I found one study
from actually from also in Proceedings of the Royal Society
be called Cognitive Capacities for Cooking and Chimpanzees. And so
one of the things they talked about in this study
is they said, okay, so we've got chimpanzees, and we
(25:27):
found out across nine studies that chimpanzees prefer cooked food.
They like to cook food better than raw food. They
also found that the Chimpanzees can understand that raw food
is transformed into cooked food through cooking, and so they
can sort of generalize this understanding and other context They
can get the point that if I have a piece
(25:47):
of raw food, cooking can turn it into cooked food.
They also will wait for cooked food. They will delay
gratification if the reward is the food being cooked. They
will give uper all food in order to see it
transformed into cooked food. And they can transport and save
or all food in anticipation of future cooking. So I
(26:10):
don't know that that seems to to go along with
this sort of instinctual thing that I think we all
feel and that I think has been found in other
animals too, that you don't just get more out of
digestion when food is cooked, but you have this natural
preference for it. Yeah, and certainly that's that matches up
with human experience. We have this primal relationship with with cooking.
(26:31):
We want to cook our food, I mean, we have
Michael Pollen in particular has a number of means. He's
written and produced documentaries that touch on this time and
time again. We have this this kind of inborn desire
to want to manipulate our foods via cooking, transform them
into these other forms. And when that, when those techniques,
(26:54):
when those practices leave our lives, we we we feel
drawn to h to commune with him another way, such
as watching a cooking shows all the time, that sort
of thing, you know. Speaking of Michael Paul and I
one of the articles I read about the cooking hypothesis,
and this was from a few years ago, so he
might have changed his mind since then, but at the
time of the article he said that he was he
(27:14):
felt pretty convinced by the cooking hypothesis, this hypothesis that
cooking is sort of an evolved biological trait that coincides
with greater incphilization or investment in brain tissue in humans. Yeah,
like I said, I think there's a strong case to
be made there. So earlier I mentioned that paper by
Galllet about the history of acquiring fire by by humans,
(27:36):
and he's the one who talked about the fire foraging bridge,
and he mentions one way that that might play into
the cooking hypothesis that I think is interesting. So I
just want to read a section from his worker. He says,
quote the analogy with other animals might suggest that in
the first instance, early hominins would go to fires simply
to take advantage of any additional opportunities of gaining prey,
(27:59):
regardless of what are the resources were cooked. For example,
the fire might reveal a clutch of eggs, so much
better if it has baked them. Uh that would that
technically be baked if the shell is still on. I
don't know. That seems kind of gross, but I've never
really done that before. Maybe, yeah, I mean, I don't know.
It would be kind of like a boiled egg. I guess, right,
(28:19):
I don't know. I've never seen it on the menu
baked eggs, but I've never seen it in the shell
on the menu. Yeah, well except in a boiled egg, right, yeah,
but not but not like over an open flame. Interesting, somehow,
it seems like it would explode. I don't know why
I think that. Well, that's an experiment for some of
our listeners to fill us in about, or that's an
experiment for us to do on Facebook Live right here
(28:41):
in the office. Open fire. But yeah, so anyway, gallet
continues quote for insevilization. New cranial finds are altering the
figures rapidly, but at the moment it would seem that
the average cranial capacity for early Homo at one point
eight million years ago, and so that's starring, you know,
close to the time of the emergence of Homorectus is
(29:03):
six hundred to six hundred and fifty cubic centimeters, which
is forty two greater than for most apes and australiopithesnes
other related animals at the time. And yet this is
earlier than Richard Rangham's postulated date of one point seven
million years ago for applying the cooking hypothesis. And then
(29:23):
he concludes saying, perhaps the fire foraging is one important
element and the cooking hypothesis comes into play more strongly later,
but other factors operate alongside both. So this is talking
about how these the fire foraging and the cooking hypothesis,
if they're both, you know, correct models of of the
history of humanity, how they sort of could fit together.
(29:45):
They're like a jigsaw puzzle that led to the fire.
I want to say, the fire regime that usually is
another meaning that the fire regime within the command of
human power and technology, and then the rest is history. Alright,
We're gonna take a quick break and when we come back,
we're going to discuss us what it means to get fire.
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(30:49):
about hb X dot com slash how stuff Works. All right,
we're back now. We all know what it means to
get fired, but we don't necessarily often think about what
it means to get fired. Do you ever really think
about this, Robert like to get it to sort of
understand what the deal with fire is. If I were
(31:11):
to take my dog up to a big bond fire,
I don't think he really understands how fire works. I
don't know. I mean, maybe I'm not giving him enough credit,
but I don't know what you think about that. I
feel like the ability to sort of get fired just
basically get a sense of, Okay, here's what you can
expect a fire to do, here's you know. Here, here's
(31:35):
what you don't have to worry about. Here's what you
do have to worry about in the presence of fire.
That's not something animals usually tend to seem to understand. Yeah,
I'm not convinced that my cat understands fire. And this
is often one of the distinctions made between humans and
other tool using animals is that humans are the only
organisms on Earth that you know, of course, know how
(31:56):
to use and control fire. Animals are often surprisingly clever,
but their reaction to fire can be sort of characterized
mostly by avoidance behaviors, and if not just by avoidance behaviors.
There are some animals that might approach fire to try
to find pray or something. They do seem to be
purely reactive right that they're they're just acting on instinct.
(32:18):
Most animals tend to avoid or flee fire or even
the sound of fire. And it's been shown that elephants
become distressed and released stress hormones in response to wildfire.
But some research published in two thousand and ten by
Jill Pruittz and Thomas Leduke I thought was very interesting
in this regard because they observed savannah chimpanzees. So these
(32:40):
are chimpanzees living on the savannah lands pan troglodites various
in Fongoli Synegal, and they recorded their reactions during these
two encounters with wildfires in March and April two thousand six.
So you've got these savannah chimpanzees, they're living out on
the plane is there in the shrub land, and and
(33:02):
a wildfire comes along, and the researchers right that during
these two encounters, the chimpanzees, unlike many other animals, reacted
pretty much totally calmly in the presence of fire, and
they would loiter near the edge of the fire and
groom themselves they'd be, you know, a few meters away
from the fire. They go fishing for termites, they'd eat
(33:23):
some saba fruit even as smoke from the fire was
coming up to block the sunlight, or maybe climbing a
tree they've just been resting in a few minutes before.
And they said that, you know, the chimps would move
to stay out of the path of the fire as
it traveled. Uh. And these brush brush fires came at
the end of the dry season, so there's plenty of
dry fuel all around, and the fires can travel actually
(33:45):
rather quickly, But the chimps just didn't panic. Instead, they
seemed to be totally confident in predicting the movements of
the fire and thus avoiding it. Uh. And this doesn't
mean they have an understanding of the chemistry of fire,
but to some ex then it requires that they have
this kind of unspoken, rudimentary understanding of how fire works.
(34:06):
For instance, that it requires fuel to burn right, that
if you get out of the way of maybe a
connecting line between the fire and some other piece of fuel,
it's not going to come towards you. And also that
its movement can be predicted by things like the direction
and speed of the wind and of course the location
of the available fuel. So, in other words, it seemed
(34:28):
like the chimps were conceptualizing fire. These chimpanzees were basically
showing that they understand how fire works, like an environmental
understanding of fire, and they knew how to give it
an appropriate distance. They knew how to get out of
its way but without panic. Though they certainly fall short
of being able to exploit it in any real way,
(34:51):
shape or form. Right, But they might not be as
far off as you would imagine, because so the researchers
set up sort of three steps they hypothesized for master fire,
and the first is the step that they think that
the chimpanzees have already mastered. Right. The first step is
the conceptualization of fire, and they characterize this as an
understanding of the behavior under varying conditions that would allow
(35:14):
one to predict fire's movement, thus permitting activity in close
proximity to the fire. Then, of course, the second step
is the ability to control fire, and this would involve
containing it, providing or depriving the fire of fuel, and
the ability to put it out. And then third, finally,
would be the ability to start a fire on your own,
(35:35):
so conceptualization, control, and then starting at yourself. Right, So
if we buy into this three step process, you can
see that the chimps already seemed to be at step one.
And what it would require for them to start gaining
mastery over fire is they wouldn't necessarily already know have
to know how to start a fire. I mean that's
sort of advanced, difficult knowledge. But imagine if they could
(35:58):
just start to figure out that, Hey, if I get
some of this fire on a stick and wave it around,
I can really scare off predators. Yeah, I mean, it's
the basic Mogli scenario right, exactly enough, the tigers your
Cohn with the with the burning branch. But that to
me does not actually seem all that implausible as chimp behavior.
I mean, that seems basically within primate tool use capability
(36:21):
already using tools using sticks, Like what's the difference between
poking a stick uh into a log to obtain termites
versus sticking a stick into an active fire to obtain
just a piece of its power? And they do seem
to respect its power in another interesting way. So Prue
It's speaking to Iowa State News about her research, was
(36:44):
describing a thing that she observed, which was a fire
dance being performed by one of the males of these chimpanzees.
So she says, quote, chimps everywhere have what's called a
rain dance. Jane Goodall, a famed primatologists, coined that term,
and it's just big male display to show dominance. Males
display all the time for a number of different reasons,
(37:05):
but when there's a big thunderstorm approaching, they do this
really exaggerated display. It's almost like slow motion. And when
I was with this one party of chimps, the dominant
male did the same sort of thing, but it was
towards the fire, so I call it a fire dance.
She also reports that she heard what seemed to her
to be a unique vocalization that was made at the
(37:29):
approaching fire that maybe in some way linked to, you know,
like maybe a fire signal. And it's interesting too that
there's this connection to with thunder that a thunderstorm and
and a fire and the like. Is if there there's
some connection there that is perceived ever so out, ever
so foggily. The primates mind these powerful energetic forces of
(37:52):
nature that you can sort of understand and be calm around,
but you you also have to respect their power. Uh.
And so there's also you can look this up online
if you want. There's some videos of the chimps around
the edge of the fire, and it's the fire is
burning through the brush and you can see them just
sort of lazing around, grooming, hanging out while this brush
(38:12):
fire smolders a few meters away. It's pretty strange to see.
But this also makes me wonder what underlies the ability
of an organism to control fire, you know, so, like,
what are the first steps? And it makes me think
that the first prerequisite to an organism that's about to
gain fire control or fire technology is probably just overcoming
(38:35):
much older instinctual fire fire behaviors, which are avoidance behaviors
and escape behaviors. Generally animals want to get away from fire.
To control fire, you have to approach it and you
have to remain near it. And I don't know, so
that seems it's like there's this sort of suicidal first
step on the road to the greatest unleashing of technological
(38:59):
capability that could happen for an animal on earth. Yeah,
and then you have to steal a portion of it,
and then you have to contain it. You almost kind
of have to kind of a domestication of the flame, yea,
so conceptualization, the ability to control it may be sequestered
in a hearth. But then of course that third step
is the ability to start a fire. And then and
(39:21):
it's it's interesting to just look at how pervasive that is,
even though a lot of us would be kind of
thrown for a loop if we had to produce it
without tools or instruments. But basically every human society can
produce fire basically. They're interestingly enough, there are some and
I have to say they're some of these claims are dubious. Uh,
there's some some controversy about these. But there have been
(39:42):
claims that you have Aboriginal people of Tasmania as well
as the Sentinalise people of the Adaman Islands. This is
a south eastern part of the Bay of bengal Um.
There have been claims that these are the only native
peoples who have survived into the nineteenth century without possessing
the knowledge of fire creation and instead had to you know,
(40:05):
quote unquote keep the fire burning, preserving lightning born embers,
perhaps in hollowed out trees like so they had to
keep it in the cage and not let it go out.
According to these According to these allegations are that they
have to we have to catch it. That's not the
Promethean idea, like Prometheus gave it, gave us this fire,
he didn't tell us how to make it, so store
it somewhere nights, like in a hollowed out lock. This
(40:25):
strikes me as one of those things that could easily
be one of those sort of wrong racist colonial discussions. Yeah,
because you know, to what extent there's also sort of
a modern longing for like that primal existence, I think.
But also they have the possibility for for racist attitudes
of these You know, these savages clearly don't have the
mastery of fire. They can only find it and then
(40:47):
carry it around. Um, it would seem based on the
research I was looking at, you could make a stronger
case for the Sentinalese people. Uh, but it seems to
remain an open question. It's it's worth noting that maintaining fire,
carrying embers from one place to another, for instance, might
not be such a weird thing to do in an
extremely wet tropical environment that limits your access to dry,
(41:10):
combustible materials, right, So like if you've always got fuel available, Yeah, um,
well you might. Even if you knew how to start
a fire, it might always be easier to just keep
one burning. So what's the point? Yeah, I mean, if
anyone is ever even if you've just stayed in a
cabin and maintained a fire in the hearth to keep warm,
you know, you know, it can be kind of a
pain in the butt to see, even if you've got matches,
(41:33):
Even if you've got matches and lighter fluid and all
the rigamarole, sometimes it's easier just to keep some portion
of a fire hot, keep the coals warm, uh, inactive
long enough to reignite it later. That doesn't mean you
don't know how to make fire, but sometimes it's the
most expedient course. Well, now that I think about it,
I know that's what I do. I mean, if I
were out in the wilderness, I always try to keep
(41:54):
something on fire instead of instead of wanting to have
to restart it every time. Yeah, I mean, I think
back on the voice out methods of you know, the
flint and or using a little little bow method that
I never could get to work, or using a crystal
I gotta say, I think that bow method you're talking about,
the one where you get the get the stick in
the string, yes, and you roll it back and forth
(42:16):
to create fire through friction with the wood on wood. Yeah,
that's my My position is that that is a scam
that nobody's ever actually done that. Uh, if you've seen
video of it, I think it's it's made with Hollywood magic.
I think I don't believe in it. Yeah, it's certainly
it would seem like it would be easier to keep
that the ambers going as opposed to doing that. But anyway,
(42:38):
that's that's our that's our take on it. Anyway, maybe
I'm just speaking out of bitterness from my childhood something
I tried and failed at many times. So as long
as we're talking about fire in the human brain, I
also did want to throw in one thing that I
thought was kind of interesting. It's just a metaphor. But
so people are always trying to come up with physical
metaphors to explain the nature of conscious us. You know,
(43:01):
what is consciousness? It's like it's one of the big
mysteries left out there. There are a lot of big mysteries,
I guess in science, but consciousness is one of the
thorniest of them because it's inherently subjective. You're essentially saying,
what can be the explanation for the existence of subjectivity?
Why aren't we all just automata with no experience? And
(43:21):
so you've got these people who would say, well, we're
we're panpsychists, right, and we believe that all matter is
in some way conscious, at least in some really rudimentary way,
that consciousness is an inherent property of objects. And then
on the other hand, you've got like the physicist Max Tegmark,
who has proposed that consciousness is a state of matter
(43:41):
like solid or liquid or gas. You know, at some
point matter arranges itself into some kind of information processing state,
and this is like a new state of matter. Uh.
And then some have also proposed that consciousness, though it's
it's not that it's nonphysical, it's based on physical reality,
is not a physical object or a physical quantity, but
(44:03):
it's rather a process. It's more like consciousness is not
the ball or the bat or the player, but the
game of baseball being played. And uh. And another way
to think about it in that sense would be that
consciousness could be kind of like fire. Yeah, since that
you know, fire isn't so much the substance, but it
(44:25):
is the interaction of things happening to chemical reaction. What
is consciousness but a slow motion explosion somedays more than others.
But yeah, I think that's a that's a valid point. Yeah,
in the same sense that the gases and the oxygen
and the fuel are not themselves fire, but they are
reacting to create fire, to to create this thing that
(44:47):
we call fire. Maybe all the you know, the cells
in your brain are not consciousness, but that they generate this, uh,
this combined property, this event we think of as consciousness,
and that we experience his consciousness. Just a weird thing
to think about. Well, on that note, Joe, I'd like
to end this episode in the this this pair of
(45:08):
episodes with a quote from one of one of my
favorite books, and I know you appreciate this one as well,
Coran McCarthy's The Road. It's also one of my favorite books. There.
There's a common motif in the book, uh that when
I first read it, I admit I didn't fully understand
what was going on when they were talking, when the
characters were talking about this, but they the main characters
(45:30):
are a father, and a son. It takes place in
a cold and dying world after the collapse of civilization
and technology. But the father and the son often speak
about carrying the fire. Indeed, so here's the quote, and
I'll leave this for everyone to contemplate. You have to
carry the fire. I don't know how to. Yes, you do.
(45:51):
Is the fire real? The fire? Yes it is? Where
is it? I don't know where it is. Yes, you do.
It's inside you. It always was there. I can see
it all right, everybody. If you would like to get
(46:12):
in touch with us, you can find us stuff to
Blow your Mind dot com. You'll find the podcast episodes there,
you'll find the blog posts, you'll find videos, and you'll
find links out to various social media accounts such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram,
Tumbler and the like. And if you'd like to spread
the fire to us, you can reach us by email
at blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com
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