March 24, 2026 • 37 mins
The first fires came from lightning strikes. After that, no one is super sure when we started controlling it and then later, starting our own. But it's sure fun to speculate!
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too. We're on fire with yet
another fire episode of Stuff you Should Know About Fire.
Speaker 3 (00:21):
Yeah, So Jerry asked me when you left the.
Speaker 4 (00:24):
Room too, surprised we hadn't done one on fire, and
I said, well, we did years ago on just sort
of more than nuts and bolts in the science of
the actual thing that is fire, right, But I commissioned
this one from Dave. I believe that's a little more
along the lines of like what did it mean for people?
And like kind of when you know? I wondered, like,
(00:45):
did we learn how to make fire? Was there like
a day that that happened? And do we know that
day and that person? And the answer is no, Unfortunately,
we don't know.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
We not only don't know that, also our technology will
all will certainly never be so advanced that we will
ever find out now. And one of the reasons why
is because there probably was multiple people at different times
around the world who learned how to manipulate fire. And
(01:16):
also there's there wasn't just like a one day where
fire didn't exist, and then all of a sudden, somebody
like strikes a flint and some hirt or something like that,
and now there's fire. It happened in stages humans interactions
with fire, and luckily for us, even though there isn't
one day that this happened and we can't say like
(01:37):
it was Todd, Todd was the one who invented fire.
It is a very fascinating subject. It's definitely up my alley.
Speaker 3 (01:44):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (01:44):
And it may have also not been linear. We may
have had control of fire for a while and then
not for a while.
Speaker 3 (01:52):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (01:53):
So basically what everyone agrees on scientifically is that the
discovery fire was not an inn, but it was a process.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
Right, And the traditional story goes that Prometheus went on
a quest for fire, ended up hooking up essentially with
a human woman, and found that humans were way better
than his own species. That's right, and we got fire
from that, that's right. So we talked a little bit
(02:22):
about fire and how much we needed I remember saying
that I saw somewhere that we're obligate fire users, that
we essentially needed it to survive, and that raised the
question like do we still need it? And the answers yes,
we use it still today, but the role that it
played in human development is just staggering. Like just the
idea of cooking alone is like just that revolutionary change
(02:47):
and all of the stuff that that unlocked for ust
nutrient wise, taste wise, let's not forget about taste. But
then also like we made metals with it, we made
pottery with it, we kept animals at bay with it,
even Mosquito they don't like fires. We learned to do
all these different things to interact and manipulate our world
using fire. So the idea of not having fire, it's
(03:10):
just terrifying.
Speaker 4 (03:12):
Yeah, for sure. And you know, I know, we talked
about this a little bit there. Theories that human language
was born around the campfire because now people were awake
and needed something to do when they sat around the fire,
like talk about what they did that day. Obviously, fires
would eventually power the fires that made steam possible and
(03:32):
steam engines possible and birth the industrial revolution.
Speaker 3 (03:35):
So fire very important.
Speaker 4 (03:39):
It's a technology which basically blew early humans minds. Obviously
they didn't learn how to make fire at first, and
we're going to go through these stages like the first
fire came from you know, a lightning strike, but even that,
you know, probably blew the minds of whatever was walking
around back then and saw the ground on fire all
(04:00):
of a sudden.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
Well yeah, what I've found fascinating though, is the idea
that fire is actually fairly new to Earth. You know,
like Earth was a watery planet for billions of years,
and it wasn't until the atmosphere kind of congealed into
its oxygenous state like it is now and that vegetation grew,
(04:21):
and then you started to have lightning strikes too. You
put all those three things together, now you've got fire
and it didn't exist before on Earth. That was not
something I've ever really thought of before. I thought that
was pretty cool.
Speaker 3 (04:33):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (04:34):
I think they said the Earth has been kind of
fire ideal for about four hundred and seventy million years,
which is certainly a long time, but not on the
order of you know, billions and billions of years. If
you go forward in time a bit to about six
million years ago, that's when the first homonyms appeared in Africa.
So now, all of a sudden, you have the conditions
(04:57):
for fire, and you have you know, say, people has
that even.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
Correct Hominin's are people yeah.
Speaker 3 (05:03):
Okay, I just don't even know what people means.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
Hominins are people, too, Chuck.
Speaker 3 (05:07):
That's what I think.
Speaker 4 (05:09):
All of a sudden, you had people that could eventually
harness fire and then learn to make fire, or at
the very least realize the benefits and take great interest
in fire.
Speaker 2 (05:18):
Yeah, they think, actually it's probable. So the best way
to kind of look back in this kind of prehistory
where there's not only no written record or even an
oral tradition, like there's no archaeological evidence at this point
yet still even right, so it's all just complete conjecture,
but a pretty good way to kind of approach the
whole thing is to say, Okay, how do animals interact
(05:40):
with fire? Right? Because those first hominins were pretty close
to the great ape ancestors we evolved from. Still, so
you can make a pretty good case that they would
have interacted with fire like other animals do it. Animals
basically run away from it, they ignore it, depending on
whether it's a third or not, and then some of
them actually use it to their advanceage, like raptors have
(06:01):
been seen picking up burning sticks and dropping them elsewhere
to flush out prey and corey essentially, which is a
jerk move, but it works.
Speaker 3 (06:11):
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 4 (06:12):
And if there was ever any kind of you know,
wildfire that started because of a lightning strike right behind that,
you would see predators like wolves or even some birds,
either preying on the animals as a flea or just
having a better hunting ground because things were now kind
of burned down.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
You could see everything, right, So you can make a
pretty good case that early early humans would have essentially
been doing the same thing that we would have eventually
figured out that fire offers things that non fiery things
don't like. For example, we probably started foraging was the
(06:48):
first step where after a wildfire we might have been
looking for things to eat and been like, this tastes
way better than when I catch it and pull its
head off and then start eating whatever happening here. This
fire is doing something great to this.
Speaker 4 (07:03):
Yeah, I mean, the idea of accidental cooked meat must
have just been mind blowing.
Speaker 2 (07:10):
Yeah, you know, I mean, a rare steak is a
thing of beauty in and of itself. But yeah, I
don't want to say well done, but yes, cooked meat
is good too. A cooked turkey leg is way better
than a raw turkey leg.
Speaker 3 (07:27):
Yeah. Hey, I've never tested that theory, but I bet
you're right.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
It's one of those things that you don't even have
to try yourself. You just innately know it. And it's
from this era.
Speaker 3 (07:38):
Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 4 (07:39):
Gathering after foraging was the next step of sort of
the discovery of fire, and that's when humans were like, hey,
I have this fire. It may have happened by lightning strike,
but I now have it in a little bindle in
my hand, and I can or maybe in a log hollow,
and I can carry this thing from one place to
(07:59):
another now, or maybe it's just a tree branch if
you're a little bit more of a simpleton like TikTok was,
and now you could transport your fire from one area
to the other, and you can use that fire to
flush prey out or to protect yourself from the sabertooth
tiger or whatever.
Speaker 2 (08:17):
Yeah, that's a big one that I hadn't really thought
of before. But you keep animals at bait because animals
are used to wildfires and not going near them. So
if you're a human or a hominin and you're huddling
around the fire, the sabertooth tiger probably isn't going to
come attack you right then.
Speaker 3 (08:33):
You never saw Jungle Book, oh very.
Speaker 2 (08:36):
Very long ago, and all I remember is Blue doing
his thing.
Speaker 3 (08:40):
Yeah, the bare necessities. Yeah so great.
Speaker 4 (08:43):
Still probably my favorite, even among the moderns. My favorite
Disney carton.
Speaker 2 (08:48):
My favorite's long been Robin Hood. That was always my
favorite as a kid.
Speaker 4 (08:52):
Yeah, I like that Robinhood a lot. But you just
can't beat There's so many bangers in the Jungle Book.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
Okay, all right, all right with that one. Then I'll
just stop. I'll throw out my own personal favorite in
favor of yours.
Speaker 3 (09:06):
Why would you do that?
Speaker 2 (09:07):
I just I just want to get along.
Speaker 3 (09:09):
Okay, all right.
Speaker 4 (09:11):
So they're carrying fire around at this point, they may
have discovered like a way to actually keep it going better,
like I know on the survival shows, like a lone
animal dung is a great, very sort of slow burning
way to transport transport fuel, like a burning cowpie.
Speaker 3 (09:28):
Maybe, yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
So that's the gathering thing. So we go from foraging
like we have no control over it. We just identified
that it's something special to being able to move it
around and keep it going. That's the key. Thanks to
the animal dung discovery, the cowpie and then we finally
reached the point. And this is where all of the
archaeologists and anthropologists and all the ologists want to kind
(09:53):
of pinpoint when did humans start making fire ourselves? And
we do have evidence of humans using fire very far back,
more than a million years ago, but for hundreds of
thousands and hundreds of thousands of years between that point
and where we are unambiguously making fire ourselves, there's a
(10:16):
lot of room for interpretation. Yes, we were cooking or something,
or we were using a fire. It's clear that there
were humans around this fire, but it's not clear that
humans actually made the fire. We may have gathered it.
When did we start making fire? That's the big question
in archaeology and anthropology.
Speaker 4 (10:36):
That's right, boy, it sounds like a notes early, but
it sounds like a perfect place for a little Cliffhanger's break.
Speaker 2 (10:42):
It's what I do.
Speaker 3 (10:43):
All right, we'll be right back.
Speaker 1 (10:44):
Everybody want to learn about a terrosort in college, horedactyl, how.
Speaker 4 (10:57):
To take a perfect boo, all about rectal that's at.
Speaker 3 (11:00):
Hunt, the Lizzie run on the plane.
Speaker 1 (11:03):
Everything, word up, Jerry.
Speaker 3 (11:11):
All right, we're back.
Speaker 4 (11:12):
We don't have a definitive answer unfortunately, But again, we
have a lot of good ideas as far as those
three stages go, they do get a little bit easier
to pinpoint a rough timeline. But that foraging stage that
we mentioned at first is that's definitely the hardest to
kind of lock down in time. There is no archaeological
record basically during that phase. But they do think, and
(11:36):
again this is people just giving their best guess. They
do think that astrolopithescenes the early humans may have been
forging around fires and this is like four million ish
years ago.
Speaker 2 (11:47):
Yeah, yeah, for sure, I didn't see why they thought that,
but like what the austrilopithekiss was doing that made them
think that, But I don't know, maybe it had to
do with their other behavior that made it seem like
they would have done that. So the gathering phase, like
I said, that dates back to about a million years ago,
where it's very clear that humans have had a fire
(12:12):
somewhere that it's not possible that like a lightning strike
set off a fire in the areas where we found
evidence of human habitation and fire together, say one hundred
feet from the mouth of a cave, very difficult for
a wildfire to start there, So that's unambiguous, is what
(12:33):
they call it, like evidence that humans were interacting or
using fire, putting fire to some controlled use at that point,
but it's far from clear whether they actually started that
and almost certainly did not a million years ago.
Speaker 4 (12:49):
Yeah, and it's that can also be a little tricky
because sometimes they confuse stuff. Stuff that might look like
charcoal or ash is some naturally occurring sediment cave. So
you know, they tried to kind of parse through that
stuff over the years, but they have found, you know,
sites like there's one and we're going to go through
a few of these in a minute, but one called
(13:10):
the Wonderwork Cave in South Africa that they basically have
agreed is probably the oldest site of controlled on purpose
fire use because they have found burnt bones there and
this is one hundred feet into a cave.
Speaker 2 (13:26):
Right, that's again unambiguous use of human fire. There's also
some contenders for when we started control like making fire
ourselves starting fires, and one's about seven hundred and eighty
thousand years ago. Four hundred thousand years seems to be
the generally accepted latest date that humans became capable in
(13:49):
a widespread fashion of making fire ourselves. So somewhere between
a million and four hundred thousand years ago humans became
capable of making fire star fires. And I say we
talk about some of these different locations that are contenders
for all this stuff.
Speaker 4 (14:07):
Well, yeah, there's the one in South Africa that I
just mentioned. They have found and been able to date
ash from that cave to about a million years ago.
But again we're not positive that that was you know,
ignited by humans or not, and they don't know exactly
how the fires were used in that case. But it
(14:28):
gets a little better as we move along. The Kassim
Cave in Israel was discovered about twenty six years ago
and that is near Tel Aviv, and this is where
they have found the first fireplace, basically the first hearth.
The dates to about three hundred thousand years so that's
pretty unambiguous.
Speaker 2 (14:47):
Yeah, and one of the reasons why they're like, yes,
this is a pit, because up to that point when
they find like use of fire, it's just like kind
of spread out. Maybe one fire was held there. This
is like layer after layer after layer of fires in
the same place. So that's clearly a hearth. There's another
one in Israel called gesher banat Yakov. It's in northern Israel,
(15:11):
and they this is the one where they think that
people were potentially starting fires as far back as seven
hundred and eighty thousand years ago, and this would have
been Homo Erectus, who was the longest lived hominin. They
lived for almost two million years. And they were clever
ones too. They were the first ones to basically take
a leap forward in stone tool technology. They also invented
(15:34):
Jordash jeans. And they know that the Homo Erectus were
the ones who were making or at least using this
fire seven hundred and eighty thousand years ago, because they
found their characteristic stone tools like hand axes, and they
were cooking fish essentially here on the banks of the
Jordan River karp that were up to like six and
a half feet from what I read and Chuck I
(15:56):
was reading about how they figured out that they were
definitely cooking fish and that they weren't just like fish
remains that they'd eaten raw and tossed into a fire.
And they tested the fish teeth that had been cooked
to see what temperature they've been exposed to it if
there were a high temperature, they probably would have been
remains just chucked in in the middle of a fire.
(16:18):
If it were exposed to a lower temperature, then this
probably would have been a controlled roast, and they found
the evidence for roasting, so they were cooking fish about
eight hundred thousand years ago there.
Speaker 3 (16:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (16:28):
The next one is the Rising Star Cave in South Africa.
Very promising cave, and this one is a little controversial
in that they do think that some sort of tiny
brain species of early human they were called the Homo naletti.
They think that they built fires in this cave, and
this was about three hundred and thirty five thousand years ago,
(16:50):
but other people came along, said no, I'm not sure
if that's when it happened. It might have been other
people that came to that cave later. And that similar
kind of goes for another cave, k the Zuchodean Cave.
That one was excavated in the nineteen twenties and people
thought for a long long time that like, hey, here's
the oldest hearth, the oldest sort of purposeful fireplace, and
(17:14):
it goes back a half a million years. But it's
kind of gone back and forth since in the nineties
nineteen nineties, that is, they saw evidence of this ash
there and they said, you know, I don't think this
is ash.
Speaker 3 (17:26):
Actually it was.
Speaker 4 (17:27):
What Chuck will talk about later as other organic materials
that looked like ash. But then later on in the
twenty tens, other people came back and had other evidence.
They said, no, I think they were purpose built fires here,
which you know, just goes to show kind of how
hard it is to really pinpoint the.
Speaker 2 (17:45):
Stuff, right, Yeah, going back and forth between the nineteen
twenties and the twenty tens like that, that's like archaeological whiplash. Yeah,
so we really need to just kind of also point
out here we're talking about Hamanin's using fire, not Homo sapiens.
Homo sapiens obviously knew how to use fire and how
(18:05):
to make fire, but almost certainly were not the ones
that came up with fire ourselves. We might have learned
it actually from some of the other species of humans
that were running around at the same time as we were,
like Neanderthals, And like I said, there's evidence of like
other species like Homo erectus using fire to one degree
(18:28):
or another as far as like maybe a million years ago,
but there's a lot of questions about did every single
species of human know how to make fire? And Neanderthals
in particular have been kind of picked on as not
necessarily knowing what they were doing with starting fires.
Speaker 4 (18:48):
Yeah, this one has some pretty good arguments going. I
think in both directions. They found evidences of activity in
France and like sites in France that.
Speaker 3 (18:58):
They excavated, Yeah, and they.
Speaker 4 (19:01):
You know, what they found was there were more traces
of fire from periods without glaciers than periods that did
have glaciers. And it doesn't really track in some ways
because you would think that they would if they could
make fire on their own, then they would have done
that when it was colder. And also it makes sense
in a way because in the period where there aren't glaciers,
(19:24):
there are going to be more lightning strikes and thunderstorms,
and the vegetation's going to be dried out. So then
may be you know, using the fire even in the
warmer periods because it's just there.
Speaker 2 (19:35):
Right exactly. They also find lots, or they have found
in some Neanderthal sites, lots of ash build up and
not necessarily because this is a very ancient hearth, but
because they had to keep the fire going, so it
was constantly going because they didn't know how to get
it started again if it went out. So yeah, those
are pretty good arguments for Neanderthals not being able to
(19:58):
make fire. But there are other people who point to
other evidence that says like, no, actually, Neanderthals knew what
they were doing. One of them is that Neanderthals made
birch bark pitch, which they used to as basically an adhesive,
like thousands of years before Homo sapiens were doing that,
(20:19):
and that they're also frequently found with manganese dioxide chunks
as black mineral, and it was usually interpreted as they
were using this to like decorate their bodies or maybe
even for cave art. Somebody has pointed out that no, actually,
manganese dioxide is a major component in fireworks and you
could use it as a pretty good fire starter. So
(20:41):
the jury's out. But for my money, they probably did
know how to start fires, because Homo sapiens have a
very very long tradition of underestimating Neanderthals and being pick
and wrong in the end as the science advances.
Speaker 4 (20:55):
Yeah, for sure, and while we don't know, you know
when all this started. We definitely know the how, and
it's kind of how modern humans start primitive fires, like
without any sort of sort of man made tools. Percussion
methods is you know, when you're striking that flint off
of you know, each other, like off of a rock,
(21:16):
it's going to spark. And you know, maybe they saw
that and thought, hey, that looks a little bit like
lightning and gave it a shot. You've got the old
fire drill method or any kind of friction method of
rubbing something together really really fast, and that'll that'll get
a fire going if you're.
Speaker 2 (21:32):
Good, Yeah, the one I've heard of. Both of those obviously,
but fire pistons I had not heard of. Essentially, you
take a tube and a piston and put together they
essentially form an air tight well coupling. I guess. You
put a little bit of tender, really really dry, almost
powdery or fibrous, like easily combustible material, right, and you
(21:56):
put the piston in the tube and you press it
really quickly, and that compression of air heats the air
just enough that it can actually ignite that tender. Then
you use the tender to catch more tender on fire,
and now you've got a fire started. Like when you
look back at some of this stuff, I was watching
a video of using bow drills to create fire. I
(22:22):
looked I was watching a really neat video. There's a
YouTube channel called make It Primitive, and they were making
birch pitch with no pots. And when you look at
this stuff they're recreating that very very ancient people figured
out how to do. It's like, how did anyone ever
accidentally stumble upon this? Like I understand we're looking at
(22:42):
like the developed endpoint version of this, you know, primitive technology.
But I can't even imagine how somebody figured out how
to make birch pitch in the first place. What happened, Yeah,
in some random fire somewhere that gave somebody the idea
to turn that into making pitch.
Speaker 3 (23:01):
Yeah, I mean I think it's kind of cool.
Speaker 4 (23:03):
Like I don't know, maybe someone rubbed their hands together
and it got hot and they were like, huh, friction
causes heat, And you know, maybe a thousand years later
that idea became maybe a lot of friction could cost
so much heat that something might actually catch on fire.
And then they start looking around on like a good
way to do that, Like that's how it had to
have happened. I just think it's amazing.
Speaker 2 (23:25):
Yeah, there was probably a transition period though, where some
Porschemo's hands were bleeding they rubbed them raw so much
trying to start a fire with them before they moved
on to wood.
Speaker 3 (23:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (23:37):
I mean what I think is amazing is that there's
really nothing new on the scene.
Speaker 2 (23:42):
You know, well, they say there's nothing new under the sun, Chuck,
I guess, so do you want to take our second
break and come back and talk. I don't know about
the history of fire, Yeah, let's do it.
Speaker 1 (24:04):
I want to learn about a terrorsort in college, horedactyl,
how to take a perfect Rectalis Khan. That's another hunt
the Lizzie Everything.
Speaker 2 (24:18):
Word up, Jerry, so kind of at the outset we
were talking a little bit about how fire just changed
humanity and there's some specific things that we used it
for that helped advance, like different species, not just Homo sapiens.
Along one is heat, Like there's a pretty widely believed
(24:41):
consensus is that we could not and we did not
move into colder climates, not just Homo sapiens, but all
hominins until we had at least figured out how to
move fire from one place to another. Without it going out,
that we just would not have been able to survive
in northern latitudes. Yeah, without fire, So that was a
(25:03):
huge thing. It allowed us to spread further and further
away from the.
Speaker 3 (25:06):
Tropics, Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 4 (25:08):
And once you got out of the tropics, that allowed
you to spread further and further wherever you were. Because
it provided light, you could explore those caves, you could
explore the darkness of the world around you. I know
I've said this before about camping, and you know when
I go to the Family camp sometimes will take people
(25:28):
that have aversions to camping, and we have some solar
power there and string lights that light up the camp
at night. And I have learned firsthand that what I
think is going on when people say they don't like
camping is that they don't like the darkness once you
leave that campfire. Because people that say they don't like
(25:48):
camping have had a great time at the family camp
because it's lit up all around you, and they've said, man,
I feel it easier and I'm never at ease in
the woods.
Speaker 3 (25:56):
I'm like this because you can see around you. It's
the dark. You're afraid of whatever you think is in
the dark.
Speaker 2 (26:01):
I feel like you're talking about Hodgmen right now, aren't you.
Speaker 3 (26:05):
You know Hodgman had a great time at the camp.
Speaker 2 (26:08):
Oh, I'm sure he did. Hodgman is a good time
wherever he goes. But I can also he's a he's
a city boy.
Speaker 3 (26:14):
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (26:15):
I let him sleep in my little uh my little camper,
the little one bad camper.
Speaker 3 (26:19):
Yeah, we snuggled up.
Speaker 2 (26:20):
That is very sweet and completely unsurprising.
Speaker 3 (26:23):
Yeah, it was sweet. It was a good snug.
Speaker 4 (26:25):
Uh And we also made tools John and I did
with our fire, which is something that the early humans did.
Speaker 2 (26:32):
So I'm a real birch bark pitch fan.
Speaker 3 (26:35):
Nowunds like it.
Speaker 2 (26:37):
Yeah, this is what it's for. So it's a it's
a tarry adhesive that you make by basically burning and
condensing birch bark. Okay, which I love birch trees in
the first place. Panda is almost a birch. It's a
quaking asspen, but they're close, they're similar. Just love that bark. Yeah,
(26:57):
you so if you just again go watch make it
primitive and the way that they make birch bark pitch.
But you take this stuff, this tari stuff. And you say,
take an arrow, and there's an arrowhead in your right hand,
there's a shaft in your left hand. There's a string
of twine in your teeth because both your other hands
are occupied, and you wind the twine around the arrowshead
(27:21):
to get it to stay on the shaft of the arrow.
And then after it's on nice and tight, then you
put a bunch of pitch around it, and man, it
really holds it fast. Now you've got an arrow that's
gonna really do the job, all thanks to your birch
bark pitch. Although let's also give a hand for twine too.
Speaker 4 (27:42):
You know, buddy, you are a hair's breadth away from
being a big fan of Alone, the show that I've
touted for a decade. They not watching it because all
this stuff thrills you.
Speaker 2 (27:53):
Do they do? They talk in it? Those their dialogue
and narration because on make it primitive. They just do
their thing.
Speaker 4 (27:59):
They don't talk, uh, I mean they put people alone
in the woods with a camera so they're you know,
they're talking somebody. There's not like Mike Road doesn't come
on and say, what Jane.
Speaker 3 (28:10):
Is doing is making an arrow?
Speaker 2 (28:13):
Gotcha? Yeah, okay, I maybe I'll give it a shot.
I don't know why I'm resistant to it either, Chuck.
I think it's just reality television. I have an aversion
to it in general.
Speaker 4 (28:24):
Yeah, I mean, I guess it's reality to me reality TV.
There's stuff like this and Top Chef that are like
real things, and then there's you know people, there's shows
where they just pit people against each other to argue
and fight like.
Speaker 3 (28:37):
Those are two different.
Speaker 2 (28:38):
Things, for sure, for sure. Yeah, agreed. But yeah, so
I think that's the only reason I'm just like not
diving in feet first.
Speaker 4 (28:47):
Well, the real question is do you prefer to cook
your meat or smoke your meat?
Speaker 2 (28:52):
Do I have to choose?
Speaker 3 (28:53):
Now you don't.
Speaker 2 (28:55):
Well, there's a question, Chuck, about whether people started heating
their meat to cook it or to smoke it. I'm
a smoker. I'm on team smoker, to put it in
a tailor swift kind of way.
Speaker 3 (29:08):
As for what you prefer or what you think they
were doing.
Speaker 2 (29:10):
What I think they were doing. I'd like smoked meat,
but it is so bad for you that I just
I eat it sparingly.
Speaker 3 (29:19):
Yeah, same here.
Speaker 4 (29:20):
So yeah, I mean the idea is that when they
hunted a big, large megafauna that they would have needed
to do something with that meat. You know, there's too
much meat to even cook and eat all at once,
even if everyone's super hungry. Right, So it seems like
smoking meat may have been the first thing.
Speaker 3 (29:40):
How they figure that out? I have no idea.
Speaker 2 (29:43):
It's all just conjecture. It just makes sense, essentially. It's
just from the size of the animal. No band of
hunter gatherers, as far as the size that we thought
or think they are, they couldn't possibly have eaten like
a wooly mammoth in one sitting.
Speaker 4 (29:56):
Yeah, but how do they know they didn't just like
eat what they could and the rest went bad.
Speaker 2 (30:00):
Because humans have a long history of not being wasteful,
and we still aren't today. I don't know. That's a
great question, man. That's basically the argument against that is that, well.
Speaker 4 (30:13):
Maybe some of these sites, would they be able to
tell if it was just bones or if it was
like former meat.
Speaker 2 (30:21):
Yeah, there's the tool marks for like getting meat off
of the bone. There's teeth marks, all right, So there
you go. Yeah, but that doesn't Yeah, I guess, Yeah,
if you looked at the whole skeleton and there was
just like one leg that was eaten and the rest
of it was there. Yeah, I think, Yeah, I'm not
sure what team I'm on now, I'm in my confused era.
Speaker 4 (30:41):
Well, we're both on team hearth because I know we
both enjoy good fire and the idea that people have
been sort of really interacting with fire. I know we
said that some people say a million years. It really
became widespread around four hundred thousand ish years ago. Yeah,
and that's when we really can have have some pretty
(31:01):
good archaeological evidence that there are hearts all over the place. Yeah,
people are building permanent setups or at least se many
semi permanent setups where they would live, and the hearth
was a big, big part of that.
Speaker 2 (31:16):
Oh yeah, for sure. You wouldn't just use a hearse
to like cook necessarily. There were different kinds of hearths
that were designed to do different kinds of things. Like
you would use the different hearths to fire, play pottery,
then you would maybe cook that one leg of masted on,
you know, and then yeah, you might have a different
hearth for sitting around the campfire and socializing and taking trooms.
Speaker 3 (31:38):
I wonder if you could cook in a kiln.
Speaker 2 (31:41):
I don't know, that'd be interesting. It'd be like dry
sou vd.
Speaker 3 (31:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (31:45):
So like you cook, you're killing your or whatever curing
your pot. You might as well throw it that turkey
leg in there.
Speaker 2 (31:53):
Do see what happens. Yeah, I'll bet it would not
look right. It might be fine taste wise, but it
would not look right.
Speaker 4 (32:01):
Yeah, Emily's getting into pottery. Maybe we'll see. I'll try
it out.
Speaker 2 (32:04):
Oh yeah, dude, let me know how to ruin her kiln. Yeah,
and see, I's gonna be like, my kiln smells like turkey.
Speaker 3 (32:11):
Sorry.
Speaker 2 (32:13):
One of the things that I thought was pretty cool
is that fire actually helped progress humans from age to age.
It was the reason we transitioned from the Stone Age
to the Metal ages. Starting with the Copper Age, we
learned how to use fire to smelt copper, and then
we started creating better and better tools from there. It
was all thanks to fire. The whole thing, all of
(32:35):
human prehistory swung on our use of fire, right there.
Speaker 3 (32:40):
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 4 (32:41):
And they've also got evidence that perhaps well not evidence,
I guess the conjecture again that it has played a
role in human biology because humans have a gene mutation
that we developed after fire. Seemingly that made us less
sensitive to smoke inhalation. Like, once fire started to be
(33:03):
a thing, people would stand around it and start coughing
and be like, well, this is no good, so they
would stand back a little bit. But eventually the AhR gene,
which helps us regulate our response to carcinogens and would smoke,
came along. That mutation came along in that gene. So
it is a pretty clear sign I think.
Speaker 2 (33:21):
Yeah, And apparently it's just found in Homo sapiens. You
can't find it in like Neanderthal DNA or Homo erectus DNA.
So it's like it just kind of goes to show
you just how important fire is. Our bodies actually evolved
to sit around fires better. Yeah, so we also learned
to shout I hate rabbits to get the smoke from
coming your way.
Speaker 3 (33:40):
I wonder where that came from.
Speaker 2 (33:41):
I don't know. It makes zero sense.
Speaker 3 (33:44):
I bet someone knows.
Speaker 2 (33:45):
Another one, Chuck, that's this makes sense, although I hadn't
really thought about it before. Our circadian rhythms changed humans.
As far as animals go, we're the most alert in
the evening. Most animals are not the most alert and
the evening they're most earlier in the day. And the
idea is that is because our interactions with fire allowed
(34:06):
us to stay up much later, and hence our circadian
rhythms changed and adjusted likewise.
Speaker 3 (34:12):
That's right.
Speaker 4 (34:13):
And then finally that all sounds good when you're sitting
around the fire talking about hunting the mastodon, But that
also means if Tuktook is sick, Tuktook is getting other
people sick. So ancient humans might have, you know, spread
disease a little more readily because people are just hanging
out more.
Speaker 2 (34:29):
Yeah. I was reading a study that they said that
tuberculosis emerged in humanity about the same time we started
using fire, like being able to control it, not necessarily
make it ourselves, but at least to move it around.
And yeah, huddling together helps of a contagible or contagious disease, Yeah,
(34:51):
spread much more easily because not only are you closer
around the fire, you're also probably in like a rock
shelter too, So tuberculosis loves fires and rock shelters. Everybody
knows that.
Speaker 3 (35:04):
That's right. And by the way, I like contagible. I
think I'm going to go with that from no one.
Speaker 2 (35:08):
Thank you, thanks for that. I appreciate that. Man. This
is why you and I are so close. You're just supportive.
What else you got, Chuck?
Speaker 3 (35:18):
I got nothing else?
Speaker 2 (35:19):
All right? I don't have anything else either. That's the
history of fire. That's everything there is to know about fire.
So don't even try to look for more. And since
I said that, obviously it's time for listener, ma'am.
Speaker 4 (35:32):
I'm going to call this follow up to gold Standard. Hey, guys,
very much enjoyed the recent episode on the gold Standard.
But I have a small correction. Weren't weren't in the
book those ruby slippers? And I guess they're talking about
the Wizard of Oz.
Speaker 2 (35:43):
Yes, yeah, Remember in the gold Standard episode we were
talking about how it was an allegory for the debate
over the gold standard and the silver standard and all that,
and we're like, I guess the ruby there was the
Ruby standard and blah blah blah, And this is what
they're writing.
Speaker 3 (35:58):
In about the book.
Speaker 4 (36:00):
Those ruby slippers were actually silver, and we're meant to
represent the silver standard, not a ruby standard. There was
a charged debate going on in the States at the
time on whether we should use the gold or silver Standard,
which was the allegory you discussed in the episode. The
movie changes silver slippers to ruby I believe to show
off the new technicolor technology parenthetical. I'm no film buff,
(36:22):
so please correct me if I'm mistaken. Hey, that sounds
good to meet Liz. Yeah, thank you guys for what
you do. I'm going to see you live and Akron
all right, Liz from Cleveland, can't wait to see you there.
Speaker 3 (36:33):
And that is a great email.
Speaker 2 (36:35):
It is a great email. Thanks a lot, Liz, and
Liz is among a handful of other people who wrote
in to tell us that, which made the whole thing
make way more sense. So nuts to Hollywood and cheers
to the original version of something.
Speaker 3 (36:49):
That's right, Ruby Standard.
Speaker 2 (36:52):
If you want to be like Liz and get in
touch with us and tell us something we don't know.
We love that kind of thing, you can send it
in an email to Stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 4 (37:06):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (37:08):
For more podcasts myheart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too. We're on fire with yet
another fire episode of Stuff you Should Know About Fire.
Speaker 3 (00:21):
Yeah, So Jerry asked me when you left the.
Speaker 4 (00:24):
Room too, surprised we hadn't done one on fire, and
I said, well, we did years ago on just sort
of more than nuts and bolts in the science of
the actual thing that is fire, right, But I commissioned
this one from Dave. I believe that's a little more
along the lines of like what did it mean for people?
And like kind of when you know? I wondered, like,
(00:45):
did we learn how to make fire? Was there like
a day that that happened? And do we know that
day and that person? And the answer is no, Unfortunately,
we don't know.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
We not only don't know that, also our technology will
all will certainly never be so advanced that we will
ever find out now. And one of the reasons why
is because there probably was multiple people at different times
around the world who learned how to manipulate fire. And
(01:16):
also there's there wasn't just like a one day where
fire didn't exist, and then all of a sudden, somebody
like strikes a flint and some hirt or something like that,
and now there's fire. It happened in stages humans interactions
with fire, and luckily for us, even though there isn't
one day that this happened and we can't say like
(01:37):
it was Todd, Todd was the one who invented fire.
It is a very fascinating subject. It's definitely up my alley.
Speaker 3 (01:44):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (01:44):
And it may have also not been linear. We may
have had control of fire for a while and then
not for a while.
Speaker 3 (01:52):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (01:53):
So basically what everyone agrees on scientifically is that the
discovery fire was not an inn, but it was a process.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
Right, And the traditional story goes that Prometheus went on
a quest for fire, ended up hooking up essentially with
a human woman, and found that humans were way better
than his own species. That's right, and we got fire
from that, that's right. So we talked a little bit
(02:22):
about fire and how much we needed I remember saying
that I saw somewhere that we're obligate fire users, that
we essentially needed it to survive, and that raised the
question like do we still need it? And the answers yes,
we use it still today, but the role that it
played in human development is just staggering. Like just the
idea of cooking alone is like just that revolutionary change
(02:47):
and all of the stuff that that unlocked for ust
nutrient wise, taste wise, let's not forget about taste. But
then also like we made metals with it, we made
pottery with it, we kept animals at bay with it,
even Mosquito they don't like fires. We learned to do
all these different things to interact and manipulate our world
using fire. So the idea of not having fire, it's
(03:10):
just terrifying.
Speaker 4 (03:12):
Yeah, for sure. And you know, I know, we talked
about this a little bit there. Theories that human language
was born around the campfire because now people were awake
and needed something to do when they sat around the fire,
like talk about what they did that day. Obviously, fires
would eventually power the fires that made steam possible and
(03:32):
steam engines possible and birth the industrial revolution.
Speaker 3 (03:35):
So fire very important.
Speaker 4 (03:39):
It's a technology which basically blew early humans minds. Obviously
they didn't learn how to make fire at first, and
we're going to go through these stages like the first
fire came from you know, a lightning strike, but even that,
you know, probably blew the minds of whatever was walking
around back then and saw the ground on fire all
(04:00):
of a sudden.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
Well yeah, what I've found fascinating though, is the idea
that fire is actually fairly new to Earth. You know,
like Earth was a watery planet for billions of years,
and it wasn't until the atmosphere kind of congealed into
its oxygenous state like it is now and that vegetation grew,
(04:21):
and then you started to have lightning strikes too. You
put all those three things together, now you've got fire
and it didn't exist before on Earth. That was not
something I've ever really thought of before. I thought that
was pretty cool.
Speaker 3 (04:33):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (04:34):
I think they said the Earth has been kind of
fire ideal for about four hundred and seventy million years,
which is certainly a long time, but not on the
order of you know, billions and billions of years. If
you go forward in time a bit to about six
million years ago, that's when the first homonyms appeared in Africa.
So now, all of a sudden, you have the conditions
(04:57):
for fire, and you have you know, say, people has
that even.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
Correct Hominin's are people yeah.
Speaker 3 (05:03):
Okay, I just don't even know what people means.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
Hominins are people, too, Chuck.
Speaker 3 (05:07):
That's what I think.
Speaker 4 (05:09):
All of a sudden, you had people that could eventually
harness fire and then learn to make fire, or at
the very least realize the benefits and take great interest
in fire.
Speaker 2 (05:18):
Yeah, they think, actually it's probable. So the best way
to kind of look back in this kind of prehistory
where there's not only no written record or even an
oral tradition, like there's no archaeological evidence at this point
yet still even right, so it's all just complete conjecture,
but a pretty good way to kind of approach the
whole thing is to say, Okay, how do animals interact
(05:40):
with fire? Right? Because those first hominins were pretty close
to the great ape ancestors we evolved from. Still, so
you can make a pretty good case that they would
have interacted with fire like other animals do it. Animals
basically run away from it, they ignore it, depending on
whether it's a third or not, and then some of
them actually use it to their advanceage, like raptors have
(06:01):
been seen picking up burning sticks and dropping them elsewhere
to flush out prey and corey essentially, which is a
jerk move, but it works.
Speaker 3 (06:11):
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 4 (06:12):
And if there was ever any kind of you know,
wildfire that started because of a lightning strike right behind that,
you would see predators like wolves or even some birds,
either preying on the animals as a flea or just
having a better hunting ground because things were now kind
of burned down.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
You could see everything, right, So you can make a
pretty good case that early early humans would have essentially
been doing the same thing that we would have eventually
figured out that fire offers things that non fiery things
don't like. For example, we probably started foraging was the
(06:48):
first step where after a wildfire we might have been
looking for things to eat and been like, this tastes
way better than when I catch it and pull its
head off and then start eating whatever happening here. This
fire is doing something great to this.
Speaker 4 (07:03):
Yeah, I mean, the idea of accidental cooked meat must
have just been mind blowing.
Speaker 2 (07:10):
Yeah, you know, I mean, a rare steak is a
thing of beauty in and of itself. But yeah, I
don't want to say well done, but yes, cooked meat
is good too. A cooked turkey leg is way better
than a raw turkey leg.
Speaker 3 (07:27):
Yeah. Hey, I've never tested that theory, but I bet
you're right.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
It's one of those things that you don't even have
to try yourself. You just innately know it. And it's
from this era.
Speaker 3 (07:38):
Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 4 (07:39):
Gathering after foraging was the next step of sort of
the discovery of fire, and that's when humans were like, hey,
I have this fire. It may have happened by lightning strike,
but I now have it in a little bindle in
my hand, and I can or maybe in a log hollow,
and I can carry this thing from one place to
(07:59):
another now, or maybe it's just a tree branch if
you're a little bit more of a simpleton like TikTok was,
and now you could transport your fire from one area
to the other, and you can use that fire to
flush prey out or to protect yourself from the sabertooth
tiger or whatever.
Speaker 2 (08:17):
Yeah, that's a big one that I hadn't really thought
of before. But you keep animals at bait because animals
are used to wildfires and not going near them. So
if you're a human or a hominin and you're huddling
around the fire, the sabertooth tiger probably isn't going to
come attack you right then.
Speaker 3 (08:33):
You never saw Jungle Book, oh very.
Speaker 2 (08:36):
Very long ago, and all I remember is Blue doing
his thing.
Speaker 3 (08:40):
Yeah, the bare necessities. Yeah so great.
Speaker 4 (08:43):
Still probably my favorite, even among the moderns. My favorite
Disney carton.
Speaker 2 (08:48):
My favorite's long been Robin Hood. That was always my
favorite as a kid.
Speaker 4 (08:52):
Yeah, I like that Robinhood a lot. But you just
can't beat There's so many bangers in the Jungle Book.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
Okay, all right, all right with that one. Then I'll
just stop. I'll throw out my own personal favorite in
favor of yours.
Speaker 3 (09:06):
Why would you do that?
Speaker 2 (09:07):
I just I just want to get along.
Speaker 3 (09:09):
Okay, all right.
Speaker 4 (09:11):
So they're carrying fire around at this point, they may
have discovered like a way to actually keep it going better,
like I know on the survival shows, like a lone
animal dung is a great, very sort of slow burning
way to transport transport fuel, like a burning cowpie.
Speaker 3 (09:28):
Maybe, yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
So that's the gathering thing. So we go from foraging
like we have no control over it. We just identified
that it's something special to being able to move it
around and keep it going. That's the key. Thanks to
the animal dung discovery, the cowpie and then we finally
reached the point. And this is where all of the
archaeologists and anthropologists and all the ologists want to kind
(09:53):
of pinpoint when did humans start making fire ourselves? And
we do have evidence of humans using fire very far back,
more than a million years ago, but for hundreds of
thousands and hundreds of thousands of years between that point
and where we are unambiguously making fire ourselves, there's a
(10:16):
lot of room for interpretation. Yes, we were cooking or something,
or we were using a fire. It's clear that there
were humans around this fire, but it's not clear that
humans actually made the fire. We may have gathered it.
When did we start making fire? That's the big question
in archaeology and anthropology.
Speaker 4 (10:36):
That's right, boy, it sounds like a notes early, but
it sounds like a perfect place for a little Cliffhanger's break.
Speaker 2 (10:42):
It's what I do.
Speaker 3 (10:43):
All right, we'll be right back.
Speaker 1 (10:44):
Everybody want to learn about a terrosort in college, horedactyl, how.
Speaker 4 (10:57):
To take a perfect boo, all about rectal that's at.
Speaker 3 (11:00):
Hunt, the Lizzie run on the plane.
Speaker 1 (11:03):
Everything, word up, Jerry.
Speaker 3 (11:11):
All right, we're back.
Speaker 4 (11:12):
We don't have a definitive answer unfortunately, But again, we
have a lot of good ideas as far as those
three stages go, they do get a little bit easier
to pinpoint a rough timeline. But that foraging stage that
we mentioned at first is that's definitely the hardest to
kind of lock down in time. There is no archaeological
record basically during that phase. But they do think, and
(11:36):
again this is people just giving their best guess. They
do think that astrolopithescenes the early humans may have been
forging around fires and this is like four million ish
years ago.
Speaker 2 (11:47):
Yeah, yeah, for sure, I didn't see why they thought that,
but like what the austrilopithekiss was doing that made them
think that, But I don't know, maybe it had to
do with their other behavior that made it seem like
they would have done that. So the gathering phase, like
I said, that dates back to about a million years ago,
where it's very clear that humans have had a fire
(12:12):
somewhere that it's not possible that like a lightning strike
set off a fire in the areas where we found
evidence of human habitation and fire together, say one hundred
feet from the mouth of a cave, very difficult for
a wildfire to start there, So that's unambiguous, is what
(12:33):
they call it, like evidence that humans were interacting or
using fire, putting fire to some controlled use at that point,
but it's far from clear whether they actually started that
and almost certainly did not a million years ago.
Speaker 4 (12:49):
Yeah, and it's that can also be a little tricky
because sometimes they confuse stuff. Stuff that might look like
charcoal or ash is some naturally occurring sediment cave. So
you know, they tried to kind of parse through that
stuff over the years, but they have found, you know,
sites like there's one and we're going to go through
a few of these in a minute, but one called
(13:10):
the Wonderwork Cave in South Africa that they basically have
agreed is probably the oldest site of controlled on purpose
fire use because they have found burnt bones there and
this is one hundred feet into a cave.
Speaker 2 (13:26):
Right, that's again unambiguous use of human fire. There's also
some contenders for when we started control like making fire
ourselves starting fires, and one's about seven hundred and eighty
thousand years ago. Four hundred thousand years seems to be
the generally accepted latest date that humans became capable in
(13:49):
a widespread fashion of making fire ourselves. So somewhere between
a million and four hundred thousand years ago humans became
capable of making fire star fires. And I say we
talk about some of these different locations that are contenders
for all this stuff.
Speaker 4 (14:07):
Well, yeah, there's the one in South Africa that I
just mentioned. They have found and been able to date
ash from that cave to about a million years ago.
But again we're not positive that that was you know,
ignited by humans or not, and they don't know exactly
how the fires were used in that case. But it
(14:28):
gets a little better as we move along. The Kassim
Cave in Israel was discovered about twenty six years ago
and that is near Tel Aviv, and this is where
they have found the first fireplace, basically the first hearth.
The dates to about three hundred thousand years so that's
pretty unambiguous.
Speaker 2 (14:47):
Yeah, and one of the reasons why they're like, yes,
this is a pit, because up to that point when
they find like use of fire, it's just like kind
of spread out. Maybe one fire was held there. This
is like layer after layer after layer of fires in
the same place. So that's clearly a hearth. There's another
one in Israel called gesher banat Yakov. It's in northern Israel,
(15:11):
and they this is the one where they think that
people were potentially starting fires as far back as seven
hundred and eighty thousand years ago, and this would have
been Homo Erectus, who was the longest lived hominin. They
lived for almost two million years. And they were clever
ones too. They were the first ones to basically take
a leap forward in stone tool technology. They also invented
(15:34):
Jordash jeans. And they know that the Homo Erectus were
the ones who were making or at least using this
fire seven hundred and eighty thousand years ago, because they
found their characteristic stone tools like hand axes, and they
were cooking fish essentially here on the banks of the
Jordan River karp that were up to like six and
a half feet from what I read and Chuck I
(15:56):
was reading about how they figured out that they were
definitely cooking fish and that they weren't just like fish
remains that they'd eaten raw and tossed into a fire.
And they tested the fish teeth that had been cooked
to see what temperature they've been exposed to it if
there were a high temperature, they probably would have been
remains just chucked in in the middle of a fire.
(16:18):
If it were exposed to a lower temperature, then this
probably would have been a controlled roast, and they found
the evidence for roasting, so they were cooking fish about
eight hundred thousand years ago there.
Speaker 3 (16:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (16:28):
The next one is the Rising Star Cave in South Africa.
Very promising cave, and this one is a little controversial
in that they do think that some sort of tiny
brain species of early human they were called the Homo naletti.
They think that they built fires in this cave, and
this was about three hundred and thirty five thousand years ago,
(16:50):
but other people came along, said no, I'm not sure
if that's when it happened. It might have been other
people that came to that cave later. And that similar
kind of goes for another cave, k the Zuchodean Cave.
That one was excavated in the nineteen twenties and people
thought for a long long time that like, hey, here's
the oldest hearth, the oldest sort of purposeful fireplace, and
(17:14):
it goes back a half a million years. But it's
kind of gone back and forth since in the nineties
nineteen nineties, that is, they saw evidence of this ash
there and they said, you know, I don't think this
is ash.
Speaker 3 (17:26):
Actually it was.
Speaker 4 (17:27):
What Chuck will talk about later as other organic materials
that looked like ash. But then later on in the
twenty tens, other people came back and had other evidence.
They said, no, I think they were purpose built fires here,
which you know, just goes to show kind of how
hard it is to really pinpoint the.
Speaker 2 (17:45):
Stuff, right, Yeah, going back and forth between the nineteen
twenties and the twenty tens like that, that's like archaeological whiplash. Yeah,
so we really need to just kind of also point
out here we're talking about Hamanin's using fire, not Homo sapiens.
Homo sapiens obviously knew how to use fire and how
(18:05):
to make fire, but almost certainly were not the ones
that came up with fire ourselves. We might have learned
it actually from some of the other species of humans
that were running around at the same time as we were,
like Neanderthals, And like I said, there's evidence of like
other species like Homo erectus using fire to one degree
(18:28):
or another as far as like maybe a million years ago,
but there's a lot of questions about did every single
species of human know how to make fire? And Neanderthals
in particular have been kind of picked on as not
necessarily knowing what they were doing with starting fires.
Speaker 4 (18:48):
Yeah, this one has some pretty good arguments going. I
think in both directions. They found evidences of activity in
France and like sites in France that.
Speaker 3 (18:58):
They excavated, Yeah, and they.
Speaker 4 (19:01):
You know, what they found was there were more traces
of fire from periods without glaciers than periods that did
have glaciers. And it doesn't really track in some ways
because you would think that they would if they could
make fire on their own, then they would have done
that when it was colder. And also it makes sense
in a way because in the period where there aren't glaciers,
(19:24):
there are going to be more lightning strikes and thunderstorms,
and the vegetation's going to be dried out. So then
may be you know, using the fire even in the
warmer periods because it's just there.
Speaker 2 (19:35):
Right exactly. They also find lots, or they have found
in some Neanderthal sites, lots of ash build up and
not necessarily because this is a very ancient hearth, but
because they had to keep the fire going, so it
was constantly going because they didn't know how to get
it started again if it went out. So yeah, those
are pretty good arguments for Neanderthals not being able to
(19:58):
make fire. But there are other people who point to
other evidence that says like, no, actually, Neanderthals knew what
they were doing. One of them is that Neanderthals made
birch bark pitch, which they used to as basically an adhesive,
like thousands of years before Homo sapiens were doing that,
(20:19):
and that they're also frequently found with manganese dioxide chunks
as black mineral, and it was usually interpreted as they
were using this to like decorate their bodies or maybe
even for cave art. Somebody has pointed out that no, actually,
manganese dioxide is a major component in fireworks and you
could use it as a pretty good fire starter. So
(20:41):
the jury's out. But for my money, they probably did
know how to start fires, because Homo sapiens have a
very very long tradition of underestimating Neanderthals and being pick
and wrong in the end as the science advances.
Speaker 4 (20:55):
Yeah, for sure, and while we don't know, you know
when all this started. We definitely know the how, and
it's kind of how modern humans start primitive fires, like
without any sort of sort of man made tools. Percussion
methods is you know, when you're striking that flint off
of you know, each other, like off of a rock,
(21:16):
it's going to spark. And you know, maybe they saw
that and thought, hey, that looks a little bit like
lightning and gave it a shot. You've got the old
fire drill method or any kind of friction method of
rubbing something together really really fast, and that'll that'll get
a fire going if you're.
Speaker 2 (21:32):
Good, Yeah, the one I've heard of. Both of those obviously,
but fire pistons I had not heard of. Essentially, you
take a tube and a piston and put together they
essentially form an air tight well coupling. I guess. You
put a little bit of tender, really really dry, almost
powdery or fibrous, like easily combustible material, right, and you
(21:56):
put the piston in the tube and you press it
really quickly, and that compression of air heats the air
just enough that it can actually ignite that tender. Then
you use the tender to catch more tender on fire,
and now you've got a fire started. Like when you
look back at some of this stuff, I was watching
a video of using bow drills to create fire. I
(22:22):
looked I was watching a really neat video. There's a
YouTube channel called make It Primitive, and they were making
birch pitch with no pots. And when you look at
this stuff they're recreating that very very ancient people figured
out how to do. It's like, how did anyone ever
accidentally stumble upon this? Like I understand we're looking at
(22:42):
like the developed endpoint version of this, you know, primitive technology.
But I can't even imagine how somebody figured out how
to make birch pitch in the first place. What happened, Yeah,
in some random fire somewhere that gave somebody the idea
to turn that into making pitch.
Speaker 3 (23:01):
Yeah, I mean I think it's kind of cool.
Speaker 4 (23:03):
Like I don't know, maybe someone rubbed their hands together
and it got hot and they were like, huh, friction
causes heat, And you know, maybe a thousand years later
that idea became maybe a lot of friction could cost
so much heat that something might actually catch on fire.
And then they start looking around on like a good
way to do that, Like that's how it had to
have happened. I just think it's amazing.
Speaker 2 (23:25):
Yeah, there was probably a transition period though, where some
Porschemo's hands were bleeding they rubbed them raw so much
trying to start a fire with them before they moved
on to wood.
Speaker 3 (23:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (23:37):
I mean what I think is amazing is that there's
really nothing new on the scene.
Speaker 2 (23:42):
You know, well, they say there's nothing new under the sun, Chuck,
I guess, so do you want to take our second
break and come back and talk. I don't know about
the history of fire, Yeah, let's do it.
Speaker 1 (24:04):
I want to learn about a terrorsort in college, horedactyl,
how to take a perfect Rectalis Khan. That's another hunt
the Lizzie Everything.
Speaker 2 (24:18):
Word up, Jerry, so kind of at the outset we
were talking a little bit about how fire just changed
humanity and there's some specific things that we used it
for that helped advance, like different species, not just Homo sapiens.
Along one is heat, Like there's a pretty widely believed
(24:41):
consensus is that we could not and we did not
move into colder climates, not just Homo sapiens, but all
hominins until we had at least figured out how to
move fire from one place to another. Without it going out,
that we just would not have been able to survive
in northern latitudes. Yeah, without fire, So that was a
(25:03):
huge thing. It allowed us to spread further and further
away from the.
Speaker 3 (25:06):
Tropics, Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 4 (25:08):
And once you got out of the tropics, that allowed
you to spread further and further wherever you were. Because
it provided light, you could explore those caves, you could
explore the darkness of the world around you. I know
I've said this before about camping, and you know when
I go to the Family camp sometimes will take people
(25:28):
that have aversions to camping, and we have some solar
power there and string lights that light up the camp
at night. And I have learned firsthand that what I
think is going on when people say they don't like
camping is that they don't like the darkness once you
leave that campfire. Because people that say they don't like
(25:48):
camping have had a great time at the family camp
because it's lit up all around you, and they've said, man,
I feel it easier and I'm never at ease in
the woods.
Speaker 3 (25:56):
I'm like this because you can see around you. It's
the dark. You're afraid of whatever you think is in
the dark.
Speaker 2 (26:01):
I feel like you're talking about Hodgmen right now, aren't you.
Speaker 3 (26:05):
You know Hodgman had a great time at the camp.
Speaker 2 (26:08):
Oh, I'm sure he did. Hodgman is a good time
wherever he goes. But I can also he's a he's
a city boy.
Speaker 3 (26:14):
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (26:15):
I let him sleep in my little uh my little camper,
the little one bad camper.
Speaker 3 (26:19):
Yeah, we snuggled up.
Speaker 2 (26:20):
That is very sweet and completely unsurprising.
Speaker 3 (26:23):
Yeah, it was sweet. It was a good snug.
Speaker 4 (26:25):
Uh And we also made tools John and I did
with our fire, which is something that the early humans did.
Speaker 2 (26:32):
So I'm a real birch bark pitch fan.
Speaker 3 (26:35):
Nowunds like it.
Speaker 2 (26:37):
Yeah, this is what it's for. So it's a it's
a tarry adhesive that you make by basically burning and
condensing birch bark. Okay, which I love birch trees in
the first place. Panda is almost a birch. It's a
quaking asspen, but they're close, they're similar. Just love that bark. Yeah,
(26:57):
you so if you just again go watch make it
primitive and the way that they make birch bark pitch.
But you take this stuff, this tari stuff. And you say,
take an arrow, and there's an arrowhead in your right hand,
there's a shaft in your left hand. There's a string
of twine in your teeth because both your other hands
are occupied, and you wind the twine around the arrowshead
(27:21):
to get it to stay on the shaft of the arrow.
And then after it's on nice and tight, then you
put a bunch of pitch around it, and man, it
really holds it fast. Now you've got an arrow that's
gonna really do the job, all thanks to your birch
bark pitch. Although let's also give a hand for twine too.
Speaker 4 (27:42):
You know, buddy, you are a hair's breadth away from
being a big fan of Alone, the show that I've
touted for a decade. They not watching it because all
this stuff thrills you.
Speaker 2 (27:53):
Do they do? They talk in it? Those their dialogue
and narration because on make it primitive. They just do
their thing.
Speaker 4 (27:59):
They don't talk, uh, I mean they put people alone
in the woods with a camera so they're you know,
they're talking somebody. There's not like Mike Road doesn't come
on and say, what Jane.
Speaker 3 (28:10):
Is doing is making an arrow?
Speaker 2 (28:13):
Gotcha? Yeah, okay, I maybe I'll give it a shot.
I don't know why I'm resistant to it either, Chuck.
I think it's just reality television. I have an aversion
to it in general.
Speaker 4 (28:24):
Yeah, I mean, I guess it's reality to me reality TV.
There's stuff like this and Top Chef that are like
real things, and then there's you know people, there's shows
where they just pit people against each other to argue
and fight like.
Speaker 3 (28:37):
Those are two different.
Speaker 2 (28:38):
Things, for sure, for sure. Yeah, agreed. But yeah, so
I think that's the only reason I'm just like not
diving in feet first.
Speaker 4 (28:47):
Well, the real question is do you prefer to cook
your meat or smoke your meat?
Speaker 2 (28:52):
Do I have to choose?
Speaker 3 (28:53):
Now you don't.
Speaker 2 (28:55):
Well, there's a question, Chuck, about whether people started heating
their meat to cook it or to smoke it. I'm
a smoker. I'm on team smoker, to put it in
a tailor swift kind of way.
Speaker 3 (29:08):
As for what you prefer or what you think they
were doing.
Speaker 2 (29:10):
What I think they were doing. I'd like smoked meat,
but it is so bad for you that I just
I eat it sparingly.
Speaker 3 (29:19):
Yeah, same here.
Speaker 4 (29:20):
So yeah, I mean the idea is that when they
hunted a big, large megafauna that they would have needed
to do something with that meat. You know, there's too
much meat to even cook and eat all at once,
even if everyone's super hungry. Right, So it seems like
smoking meat may have been the first thing.
Speaker 3 (29:40):
How they figure that out? I have no idea.
Speaker 2 (29:43):
It's all just conjecture. It just makes sense, essentially. It's
just from the size of the animal. No band of
hunter gatherers, as far as the size that we thought
or think they are, they couldn't possibly have eaten like
a wooly mammoth in one sitting.
Speaker 4 (29:56):
Yeah, but how do they know they didn't just like
eat what they could and the rest went bad.
Speaker 2 (30:00):
Because humans have a long history of not being wasteful,
and we still aren't today. I don't know. That's a
great question, man. That's basically the argument against that is that, well.
Speaker 4 (30:13):
Maybe some of these sites, would they be able to
tell if it was just bones or if it was
like former meat.
Speaker 2 (30:21):
Yeah, there's the tool marks for like getting meat off
of the bone. There's teeth marks, all right, So there
you go. Yeah, but that doesn't Yeah, I guess, Yeah,
if you looked at the whole skeleton and there was
just like one leg that was eaten and the rest
of it was there. Yeah, I think, Yeah, I'm not
sure what team I'm on now, I'm in my confused era.
Speaker 4 (30:41):
Well, we're both on team hearth because I know we
both enjoy good fire and the idea that people have
been sort of really interacting with fire. I know we
said that some people say a million years. It really
became widespread around four hundred thousand ish years ago. Yeah,
and that's when we really can have have some pretty
(31:01):
good archaeological evidence that there are hearts all over the place. Yeah,
people are building permanent setups or at least se many
semi permanent setups where they would live, and the hearth
was a big, big part of that.
Speaker 2 (31:16):
Oh yeah, for sure. You wouldn't just use a hearse
to like cook necessarily. There were different kinds of hearths
that were designed to do different kinds of things. Like
you would use the different hearths to fire, play pottery,
then you would maybe cook that one leg of masted on,
you know, and then yeah, you might have a different
hearth for sitting around the campfire and socializing and taking trooms.
Speaker 3 (31:38):
I wonder if you could cook in a kiln.
Speaker 2 (31:41):
I don't know, that'd be interesting. It'd be like dry
sou vd.
Speaker 3 (31:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (31:45):
So like you cook, you're killing your or whatever curing
your pot. You might as well throw it that turkey
leg in there.
Speaker 2 (31:53):
Do see what happens. Yeah, I'll bet it would not
look right. It might be fine taste wise, but it
would not look right.
Speaker 4 (32:01):
Yeah, Emily's getting into pottery. Maybe we'll see. I'll try
it out.
Speaker 2 (32:04):
Oh yeah, dude, let me know how to ruin her kiln. Yeah,
and see, I's gonna be like, my kiln smells like turkey.
Speaker 3 (32:11):
Sorry.
Speaker 2 (32:13):
One of the things that I thought was pretty cool
is that fire actually helped progress humans from age to age.
It was the reason we transitioned from the Stone Age
to the Metal ages. Starting with the Copper Age, we
learned how to use fire to smelt copper, and then
we started creating better and better tools from there. It
was all thanks to fire. The whole thing, all of
(32:35):
human prehistory swung on our use of fire, right there.
Speaker 3 (32:40):
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 4 (32:41):
And they've also got evidence that perhaps well not evidence,
I guess the conjecture again that it has played a
role in human biology because humans have a gene mutation
that we developed after fire. Seemingly that made us less
sensitive to smoke inhalation. Like, once fire started to be
(33:03):
a thing, people would stand around it and start coughing
and be like, well, this is no good, so they
would stand back a little bit. But eventually the AhR gene,
which helps us regulate our response to carcinogens and would smoke,
came along. That mutation came along in that gene. So
it is a pretty clear sign I think.
Speaker 2 (33:21):
Yeah, And apparently it's just found in Homo sapiens. You
can't find it in like Neanderthal DNA or Homo erectus DNA.
So it's like it just kind of goes to show
you just how important fire is. Our bodies actually evolved
to sit around fires better. Yeah, so we also learned
to shout I hate rabbits to get the smoke from
coming your way.
Speaker 3 (33:40):
I wonder where that came from.
Speaker 2 (33:41):
I don't know. It makes zero sense.
Speaker 3 (33:44):
I bet someone knows.
Speaker 2 (33:45):
Another one, Chuck, that's this makes sense, although I hadn't
really thought about it before. Our circadian rhythms changed humans.
As far as animals go, we're the most alert in
the evening. Most animals are not the most alert and
the evening they're most earlier in the day. And the
idea is that is because our interactions with fire allowed
(34:06):
us to stay up much later, and hence our circadian
rhythms changed and adjusted likewise.
Speaker 3 (34:12):
That's right.
Speaker 4 (34:13):
And then finally that all sounds good when you're sitting
around the fire talking about hunting the mastodon, But that
also means if Tuktook is sick, Tuktook is getting other
people sick. So ancient humans might have, you know, spread
disease a little more readily because people are just hanging
out more.
Speaker 2 (34:29):
Yeah. I was reading a study that they said that
tuberculosis emerged in humanity about the same time we started
using fire, like being able to control it, not necessarily
make it ourselves, but at least to move it around.
And yeah, huddling together helps of a contagible or contagious disease, Yeah,
(34:51):
spread much more easily because not only are you closer
around the fire, you're also probably in like a rock
shelter too, So tuberculosis loves fires and rock shelters. Everybody
knows that.
Speaker 3 (35:04):
That's right. And by the way, I like contagible. I
think I'm going to go with that from no one.
Speaker 2 (35:08):
Thank you, thanks for that. I appreciate that. Man. This
is why you and I are so close. You're just supportive.
What else you got, Chuck?
Speaker 3 (35:18):
I got nothing else?
Speaker 2 (35:19):
All right? I don't have anything else either. That's the
history of fire. That's everything there is to know about fire.
So don't even try to look for more. And since
I said that, obviously it's time for listener, ma'am.
Speaker 4 (35:32):
I'm going to call this follow up to gold Standard. Hey, guys,
very much enjoyed the recent episode on the gold Standard.
But I have a small correction. Weren't weren't in the
book those ruby slippers? And I guess they're talking about
the Wizard of Oz.
Speaker 2 (35:43):
Yes, yeah, Remember in the gold Standard episode we were
talking about how it was an allegory for the debate
over the gold standard and the silver standard and all that,
and we're like, I guess the ruby there was the
Ruby standard and blah blah blah, And this is what
they're writing.
Speaker 3 (35:58):
In about the book.
Speaker 4 (36:00):
Those ruby slippers were actually silver, and we're meant to
represent the silver standard, not a ruby standard. There was
a charged debate going on in the States at the
time on whether we should use the gold or silver Standard,
which was the allegory you discussed in the episode. The
movie changes silver slippers to ruby I believe to show
off the new technicolor technology parenthetical. I'm no film buff,
(36:22):
so please correct me if I'm mistaken. Hey, that sounds
good to meet Liz. Yeah, thank you guys for what
you do. I'm going to see you live and Akron
all right, Liz from Cleveland, can't wait to see you there.
Speaker 3 (36:33):
And that is a great email.
Speaker 2 (36:35):
It is a great email. Thanks a lot, Liz, and
Liz is among a handful of other people who wrote
in to tell us that, which made the whole thing
make way more sense. So nuts to Hollywood and cheers
to the original version of something.
Speaker 3 (36:49):
That's right, Ruby Standard.
Speaker 2 (36:52):
If you want to be like Liz and get in
touch with us and tell us something we don't know.
We love that kind of thing, you can send it
in an email to Stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 4 (37:06):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (37:08):
For more podcasts myheart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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