Abstract
Numbers of animal species react to the natural phenomenon of fire, but only humans have learnt to control it and to make it at will. Natural fires caused overwhelmingly by lightning are highly evident on many landscapes. Birds such as hawks, and some other predators, are alert to opportunities to catch animals including invertebrates disturbed by such fires and similar benefits are likely to underlie the first human involvements with fires. Early hominins would undoubtedly have been aware of such fires, as are savanna chimpanzees in the present. Rather than as an event, the discovery of fire use may be seen as a set of processes happening over the long term. Eventually, fire became embedded in human behaviour, so that it is involved in almost all advanced technologies. Fire has also influenced human biology, assisting in providing the high-quality diet which has fuelled the increase in brain size through the Pleistocene. Direct evidence of early fire in archaeology remains rare, but from 1.5 Ma onward surprising numbers of sites preserve some evidence of burnt material. By the Middle Pleistocene, recognizable hearths demonstrate a social and economic focus on many sites. The evidence of archaeological sites has to be evaluated against postulates of biological models such as the ‘cooking hypothesis' or the ‘social brain’, and questions of social cooperation and the origins of language. Although much remains to be worked out, it is plain that fire control has had a major impact in the course of human evolution.This article is part of the themed issue ‘The interaction of fire and mankind’.
Highlights
Fire is universally accepted as important to human life, with myriad expressions and uses in the modern world [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]
This paper starts with the view that such human fire use is an offshoot or outgrowth of far older natural fire regimes [9,10,11,12,13,14,15], and it aims to address two main issues: when and how humans came to be engaged with fire; and what are the main long-term impacts that their fire use has had on the natural environment? In the first place, large numbers of lightning strikes would have made fire evident to early humans in the form of bush fires, even aside from other rarer forms of natural ignition such as volcanic activity [16]
The vanishing act of early fire ensures that it remains difficult to investigate, so that widely varying views remain both about its first take-up and subsequent use, but recently a changed perception has emerged
Summary
Fire is universally accepted as important to human life, with myriad expressions and uses in the modern world [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]. The second half indicates, for Homo lineages at least, a new complex of adaptation committed to long ranging, open environments, meat eating and other new foods [34,35,36] In this context, encounters with fire must have become far more frequent and significant (figure 2). 2 At the same time, new finds from northern Ethiopia set the origins of our own genus, Homo, as early as 2.8 Ma [38] These discoveries square with others that indicate a dispersal of hominins across the Old World far earlier than was expected a few years ago—dates of 1.8 Ma in Georgia and eastern Syria, 1.7 Ma in northern China and more than 1.5 Ma in Java are strong indicators that the actual dispersal goes back further, perhaps more than 2 Myr [39,40,41,42,43]. We must be alert to possibilities that hominins could have been interacting with fire in simple ways from an early date [47]
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