The second thread on “Walking Critters Settled Down.”
This was 1.9m years ago.
Fire would have freed up time: the previous thread mentioned how long our 3m year ago ancestor spent eating her raw food.
Fire would have protected campsites from big predators.
Java Man, first discovered in Indonesia:
Quote:bones of forty . . . individuals in a cave system outside Beijing, that the scientific community recognized Dubois’ discovery for what it was: a staggeringly significant confirmation of Charles Darwin’s theory of man’s evolution. Biologists called this new species Homo erectus (upright man) and for a time believed it was indeed the missing link—the single species that connected Homo sapiens to the great apes.
There was of course more than one link between us and the chimpanzee/bonobo line.
Quote: . . .forty years later, in east Africa, Mary and Louis Leakey discovered evidence of another, older primate species. They called it Homo habilis (“handy man”) for the assortment of chipped rock tools they found nearby. The question then became how the two species were related.
Link between H habilis and H erectus? What could explain the far larger braincase, smaller jaw and smaller chest of H. Erectus?
Quote:Scientists began to suspect a group of H. habilis did, in fact, evolve into H. erectus. What could account for this radical transformation? According to Harvard primatologist Richard Wrangham, the entire suite of morphological changes can be explained by one simple yet profoundly consequential, species-altering trick: Someone learned to control fire. . . .
Charles Darwin called the mastery of fire the single greatest discovery in the history of our species, excepting language.
Remember how much time early hominoids spent eating. Ma, from the previous thread, was a scavenger, used stones to break open bones from a kill by a predator and so access the rich marrow no other carnivore or scavenger could eat. Ate it raw. Now, with fire:
Quote:On the most basic level, applying heat to food outsources chewing and digestion. It not only softens food, but breaks down its chemical bonds. This sounds like trivial convenience. It isn’t. The smaller and softer the pieces of muscle, fat, sinew, and cellulose in food—and the more their chemical bonds are broken—the more of their energy the intestines can absorb. The result is that food, either from plant or animal, provides 25 to 50 percent more calories when it’s cooked as opposed to when it’s eaten raw. The control of fire therefore resulted in a massive caloric influx to which our bodies have long since adapted. Homo sapiens have evolved to eat cooked food as much as the giraffe has evolved to eat the highest leaves.
Dogs and cats have snouts—this allows huge leverage to be applied ot the teeth. We would be ratshit at eating raw meat like our pets. We’d get sick too—have a long digestive tract.
Now, who was it?
Quote:Martine was a H. habilis born approximately 1.9 million years ago in East Africa, a long, long time before the emergence of anatomically modern humans. . . .had a braincase roughly 40 percent the size of a modern H. sapiens. Her forehead sloped gently to jaws that jutted forward to house a set of larger teeth that had a far more powerful bite than a H. sapiens.
OK, Martine worked stone to make tools, hitting flint at the right place with the right force to knap off sharp edged bits of flint. What happens when you bang two rocks together, especially with one of them being flint? Sparks fly and Martine would have seen that. She would even have started a fire a few times as the sparks hit dry vegetation. So would all her compatriots of course—all made flint tools! Maybe a spark started a forest fire or a forest fire was started by dry lightning—Martin e would have taken advantage of that:
Quote:Chimps in Senegal are known to successfully navigate around their habitat’s regularly occurring wildfires. They can predict a wildfire’s path and sometimes even seek it out in order to forage the scorched grasslands for cooked food, which is how all mammals, including chimps, prefer their meals.
Can’t count on opportunistic wildfires to cook food!
Quote:. . .her genius would have been her insight into why rock-sish triking occasionally sparked fires but usually didn’t. The answer comes down to geology. Lighting fires by chipping stones is either straightforward or impossible, depending on which stones you choose. The key is pyrite. . . .Hominins have used pyrite to ignite fires for as long as the archaeological record can indicate. The five-thousand-year-old Ötzi the Iceman had a fire-starting kit of pyrite flakes, flint, and fungus tinder inside his pack. . . .Martine’s insight that the dark, brittle rock with shiny flakes was the key is unquestionably the most consequential observation in hominin history.
Cassidy, Cody. Who Ate the First Oyster?: The Extraordinary People Behind the Greatest Firsts in History . Headline. Kindle Edition.
Will finish this later. There are a couple of resources I will list too, help to understand.
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Who discovered fire? (Read 221 times)
