All humans manipulate fire, and only humans do so. We are truly a species touched by fire. Fire opened the night by providing light and heat. It protected caves and shelters. It rendered foods more edible, leached away toxins from cassava and tannic acid from acorns, and killed bacteria that caused salmonella, parasites that led to trichinosis, and waterborne microbes. It interacted with every conceivable technology from flint mining to ochre painting. Fire was a god, or at least theophany; fire was myth; fire was science; fire was power. We could call it forth as we could not call forth floods or earthquakes or droughts.
The control of fire reformed hominids as well. It changed diets. It released the skull from having to brace the enormous muscles required to chew uncooked foods, thus perhaps allowing the skull to swell and the brain along with it. Certainly fire’s possession altered social relationships. Groups defined themselves by their shared fire. Domestication itself most likely began with the tending of the flame. Like a being, it had to be conceived, fed, protected, put to bed, awakened, trained, controlled, exercised, bred—in effect, socialized into a human life. It required constant attention. For it to expire was a calamity.
But was fire really that critical? Try this, as a thought experiment. Remove every vestige of tamed fire and examine what remains. Remove the hearth fire, the cooking fire, the protective ring of evening flames, the fires that softened flint and hardened wood, the fires around which humans gathered to talk and share stories and learn about the meaning of the stars and the grassy veld. Remove that central flame and the center no longer holds. Humanity’s other tools, those shaped without recourse to controlled fire, grant humans no greater power than the talons and fangs and bulking muscles and sense of smell that our competitors possess. As fire myths so universally declare, without fire humanity sinks to a status of near helplessness, a plump chimp with a scraping stone and digging stick, hiding from the night’s terrors, crowding into minor biotic niches.
But the Faustian pact with fire was reciprocal. If fire freed humanity, it is also true that humanity unshackled flame. Every place humans visited, they touched with fire. They brought fire to landscapes that had not known it. They restructured fire regimes that had experienced one kind of fire and gave them another. Fire and humanity pushed and pulled each other around the globe. They advanced together—spreading like flaming fronts, spotting into favorable sites, probing into marshes, flaring amid thickets, smoldering amid peat, crackling through scrub, all as the fuels of environmental opportunity and the climate of culture allowed. Charcoal is among the most reliable of records of this hominid diaspora. The residue of the hearth fire, the charred bones of meals and cremations, a site-shattering layer of black carbon that marks a dramatic shift in the ecological order are all the signatures of human passage. In real as well as symbolic terms, humanity and fire came to resemble one another such that the tread of one tracked the tread of the other.
In The Republic, Plato likened the human condition to life in a cave, illuminated only by flames. But the allegory is deeper than Platonic idealism. In Swartkrans, a South African cave, the oldest deposits hold caches of bones, the prey of local carnivores. Those gnawed bones contain the abundant remains of ancient hominids. Above that record rests, like a crack of doom, a stratum of charcoal; and atop that burned break, the proportion of bones abruptly reverses. Above the charcoal, the prey have become predators. Hominids have claimed the cave, remade it with fire, and now rule. That, in a nutshell, is what has occurred throughout the earth. What happened with early prey relationships happened also with fire. As humans have successfully challenged lightning for control over ignition, the whole world has become a hominid cave, illuminated, protected, nurtured, warmed and controlled by the flame over which humanity exercises its unique power and through which it has sought an ethic to reconcile that power with responsibility. Ours became the dominant fire regime of the planet.
Yet the earth did not quite get what it supposed. The biosphere needed a reliable spark whose timing obeyed biotic rhythms, subject to ecological processes, shaped by natural selection. Ideally ignition could be coded by instinct. A creature would set fires much as elms shed leaves or salmon turn upstream to spawn. What nature got instead was a sentient being whose neural net was short-circuited by synapses of society and culture. The earth’s keeper of the flame kept it for his own purposes.
From Fire: A Brief History (University of Washington Press, October 2001). ©2001. Reprinted by permission of the University of Washington Press.
