Fire

Back at reference 1, I noticed the book at reference 2 about a pre-historic band losing its fire and the subsequent quest to get another one. The point, on this fictional account, being that these early humans had discovered the benefits of fire and had learned how to keep a fire, but not how to light a fire. This keeping included quite elaborate arrangements for keeping a fire alight, for guarding it against others and for moving it about. Arrangements which included things called ‘cages à feu’. All being matters about which young humans were trained from a very young age. Fire had become an important part of life.

I assume that the idea is that one takes one first fire from the remains of some natural fire, perhaps the result of a lightning strike, certainly still common enough in the forests of our northern latitudes. 

I then turn to reference 3, yet another book that I am working my way through, where the line seems to be that early humans did not develop serious intelligence until around 60,000 years ago. While from references 4 and 5 it seems clear that early humans were making extensive use of fire, certainly from around 400,000 years ago, when what appear to be fireplaces start to appear at scale. One such site being that noticed at reference 6.

So a post spun out of the book at reference 2, rather than about it.

Speculations

Now my take is that the contraptions for moving fire around described in reference 2 were quite complicated. And the arrangements for making fire are quite complicated too. So not something that early humans would have been good for 400,000 years ago. So what happened in the interval?

They would no doubt have taken burning wood from natural fires and used it to make their own fires. They would have learned about managing fires. And given that they were mostly nomadic until the invention of agriculture, say 10,000 years ago, they may well have worked out how to make containers to move fire around in. And the necessary social arrangements needed to support all this.

I associate to guarding the sacred flame – which one had at oracles in both Greece and Rome in antiquity. And to the symbolic use of perpetual flames which has persisted to our own times.

Early humans had plenty of experience of bashing rocks together – so it seems quite likely that they would know about making sparks in this way. And they would have seen sparks from both natural fires and their own fires igniting natural tinder – perhaps some dry grass – from time to time. But when did they take the next step of using their own sparks to ignite their own tinder?

Another bit of the story

Towards the end of the book, we find that that the Neanderthals, who could not make fire, coexisted with early humans who could. The suggestion being that the ability to make fire took a while – perhaps tens or hundreds of thousands of years – to spread. It was not a eureka moment for humanity as a whole, more or less all at once.

Ancient fire in Europe

This section being lifted from reference 4 and the supplementary information which goes with it.

Good evidence for fire only picks up in Europe from around 300,000 to 400,000ya. The authors conclude that early humans managed to move up from Africa to the much colder northern latitudes before they became habitual, let alone obligatory, fire users.

We have a flint flake with traces of hafting pitch from 200,000ya – and one would have needed fire to make the pitch. The making of such adhesives, some with quite complicated recipes, has prompted a lot of discussion of the necessary, supporting cognitive skills – the sort of discussion which is also to be found at reference 3.

But I do not find the support needed for: ‘… We conclude that Middle Paleolithic Neandertals did not have to wait for lightning strikes, meteorite falls, volcanoes, or spontaneous combustion: they had the ability to make, conserve, and transport fires during successive occupations or at different sites, like ethnographically documented recent hunter-gatherers, a pattern comparable to that documented in the Upper Paleolithic…’.

A French take

This section being lifted from reference 5. 

This author agrees that fire did not become a regular part of the early human repertoire in Europe until around 400,000ya. And he also appears to argue that the appearance of fireplaces at about the same time is sufficient evidence that those early humans not only used fire, but made it.

Making and moving fire

There seem to be three relevant ways to make fire. First, striking sparks into tinder by striking a pyrites rock against a suitable flint – it so happening that these two are often found together. Second, rubbing a sharpened stick up a down a tinder filled groove in a flat piece of wood. Third, drilling a sharpened stick into a tinder filled hole in a piece of wood. Or perhaps a crack in a decaying tree trunk. Tinder usually being some dried fungal or vegetable matter, powdered or rubbed into fibres.

Tinder in two phases: tinder one to take the sparks and to start glowing; tinder two – perhaps dried grass or something of that sort - to wrap around the then glowing tinder one, so converting the glowing to flaming. Quite a lot of gentle blowing involved.

Bing turns up plenty of YouTube video clips about how to do this on the key ‘sparks pyrites’. See, for example, reference 16. 

Lots of cultures go in for little pouches containing all that is necessary to light a fire – low technology versions of the tinder boxes which used to be common in the UK until relatively recently – an example of which is snapped above. And sometimes a lot of effort would be put into the manufacture of these pouches.

The evidence from Tasmania – and no doubt elsewhere – is that their aborigines moved fire about in fire sticks, for which see below. Not the complicated cages that our book talks of at all. 

Apart from the pyrites, not the sort of things that are likely to leave good traces in the archaeological record.

There is an introduction to all this at reference 13 – which includes the new-to-me technique, popular in East Asis of old, of ignition by compressed air. Seemingly the wheeze which sparked Diesel’s invention of diesel ignition. From where I associate to memories of how hot the compression end of a bicycle pump could get – heat which I had always assumed to be do with friction rather than compression.

A small sample of other research taken from the EAORC bulletin

That is to say, the useful bulletin published by the Evolutionary Anthropology Online Research Cluster. Sample turned up by the gmail search feature.

Neanderthals

The paper at reference 9 is built around the 1981 film of the present book, a film which is described at reference 7. A film which was based on the premise that Neanderthals used fire but could not make it. A premise which was not widely believed at the time, but which excavations of long sequences of sediments in caves in southwest France, suggest may have been correct all along. Neanderthals did use fire – but also seemed to manage without it for long periods. In particular, around 50,000 years ago. It seems reasonable to suppose that this was because they had to, rather than because they chose to. That is to say, they did not know how to make fire.

Homo floresiensis

The paper at reference 10 is about the use of fire of small hominins in what is now Indonesia around 50,000 years ago. About whether or not they used fire for cooking, rather than about how they got the fire in the first place. But more about the way that newsworthy stories which turn out to be wrong persist in the record – and even in the minds of specialists who one might think should know better.

The difficulty of interpreting sequences of disturbed sediments is pointed up. 

Background.

Spain

The paper at reference 11 is about the use of fire at a site in Spain 250,000 years ago. The claim is that ‘the use of specific resources such as decaying pine wood; specific activities, such as the low-temperature fires used for cooking; and intention, which can be implied by the need to transport large carcasses to a single location where fire was being used’ combine to amount to strong evidence that these early humans made fire as well as used fire.

Here the scientific trickery is chemical, specifically lipid biomarkers and polyaromatic hydrocarbons.

Fire pits

A new technique makes it possible to look at the timetable for a related collection of Neanderthal fire pits in Spain, dating from around 50,000 years ago, in far more detail than was possible before.

Subtle traces of the earth’s changing magnetic field left in burnt ferromagnetic materials. 

Background.

A near modern comparator

This section being lifted from reference 8, particularly the start of Chapter V and Appendix II.

It seems that at the time of writing at least, the picture was quite confused. However, by the first half of the nineteenth century, it seems that at least three methods for making fire were around: flint, drill & socket, stick & groove. The aborigines also carried fire about, either in the form of firesticks, often made of a sort of bark, or fire sheets, often made of a sort of fungus, both of which could smoulder for a long time. All of which could be a problem when the weather was wet.

I associate to the slow match once used by naval gunners and others, usually made of chemically treated rope or cord – but sometimes made of cord made from bark.

I was reminded of the often atrocious treatment of the aborigines by the settlers.

Conclusions

There seems to be something of a consensus that regular use of fire by early humans arrived in Europe around 400,000 years ago. But there is also a view that the use of fire did not become obligatory until rather later, perhaps 200,000 years later. And while most archaeologists appear to believe that the existence of decent fireplaces is sufficient evidence of being able to make fire, I have not been able to turn up evidence that makes me prefer that story to that offered by Rosny.

Furthermore, while I dare say that plenty of the facts in his book were wrong or have turned out to be wrong, I am left with the feeling that, with old fashioned archaeology being overwhelmed by a deluge of statistics, physics and biology, there is room for a bit of old fashioned story telling. Maybe the creatives can come up with something that the professionals have missed?

In this case, perhaps the professionals should give as much attention to the business of moving fire about as they have already given to that of lighting it in the first place.

And it is perhaps odd that ‘fire’ does not appear in the index of reference 3. Making fire is a complicated business requiring a good sized brain in which Mithen might have taken an interest. He does, to be fair, briefly mention the perhaps more complicated business of making adhesives to haft large points to spear shafts or small points to arrows. And then, how much of this needs to have been – or perhaps just was – articulated with language, in consciousness?

PS: the opening snap, from the film, was turned up by Bing.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/12/the-outsider.html. 

Reference 2: La Guerre du Feu – J. H. Rosny aîné – 1911.

Reference 3: The prehistory of the mind: a search for the origins of art, science and religion – Mithen, S. J – 1996. 

Reference 4: On the earliest evidence for habitual use of fire in Europe – Wil Roebroeks and Paola Villa – 2011. 

Reference 5: Il y a 400 000 ans : la domestication du feu, un formidable moteur hominisation – Henry de Lumley – 2004.

Reference 6: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2016/10/beeches-pit-one.html. 

Reference 7: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quest_for_Fire_(film). In this telling, a film which only retains a rather loose connection with the original story. Plus lashings of sex which were not there at all.

Reference 8: The Aborigines of Tasmania – Roth HL – 1899. Made available by the Google project to digitise everything in the world of books.

Reference 9: Who Started the First Fire: Humans’ ability to control fire is among the most important technological advances in our evolutionary history. Research on Neanderthal cave sites in France is offering new insights on this old enigma - Harold L. Dibble, Dennis Sandgathe, Sapiens – 2017. 

Reference 10: Extinguishing the Idea That Hobbits Had Fire: Research has overturned earlier claims that a diminutive human relative, Homo floresiensis, lit fires—but big stories die hard - Elizabeth Grace Veatch, Sapiens – 2023. 

Reference 11: Humans were using fire in Europe 50,000 years earlier than we thought – new research - Clayton Magill, The Conversation - 2023.

Reference 12: These Neanderthal fire pits offer an extraordinarily precise snapshot of ancient life: Researchers used traces of Earth’s changing magnetic field in sediments to identify the activity of ancient humans – Ewen Callaway, Nature – 2024.

Reference 13: https://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories/ways-catching-spark-history-fire-making-methods. 

Reference 14: https://woodsrunnersdiary.blogspot.com/2014/02/18th-century-tinder-box-types.html. 

Reference 15: https://georgianera.wordpress.com/2016/11/08/guest-post-by-laurie-benson-from-a-spark-to-a-flame/. 

Reference 16: https://youtu.be/-Yu0qR5C4g8.