Fire starters
On raw meat, storytelling, and what it means that humans may have figured out how to make fire more than 300,000 years earlier than previously known
Evidence found in England seems to suggest that some Neanderthals knew how to make fire and did it to make objects out of clay something like 415,000 years ago -- vastly longer ago than when it was previously thought. The ability to make fire substantially enlarged human abilities, since it made settlement possible in much colder places than our ancestors could have occupied before.
■ Fire also made it possible to cook meat and certain plants, killing off pathogens and making the food softer and easier to chew (which makes the eating process more efficient). Fewer calories expended on chewing and digestion means more net calories making it to the body per meal.
■ The efficiency gains don’t matter much one meal at a time, but added up over the course of years, and then over generations, it matters quite a lot. It also means more people can be fed from the results of the same hunt or harvest, which increased the size of the communities that could live together.
■ And since we are social animals who actively share our intelligence, larger groups would tend to mean more knowledge could be stored and shared. We have convincing evidence that Neanderthals had the capacity for speech as we know it, so the discovery makes it possible to imagine stories being told around a campfire more than 400,000 years ago -- or more than 13,000 human generations ago. The evidence makes the tale of human history much more interesting.
