Becoming Human: Forged by Fire

This is the third article in a series about the Earth-system – how our planet has shaped us as human beings, and how we, in turn, have shaped it. Read the series: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12

Fire looms large in the ancient myths of many peoples around the world. Interestingly, most of these old stories share a common motif, in which fire was withheld from humankind—either by gods or by some other being—until humans finally acquired it only through an act of theft, violence, or other ignoble means.

In a tale from ancient Greece, the god Prometheus steals fire from his fellow gods to share it with humans; for this transgression, the other gods condemn him to endure an eternity of torture. The Polynesian demigod, Maui the trickster, ventures to the end of the world to retrieve fire from his grandmother Pele, the god of fire, by taking her burning fingernails one by one—only to churlishly extinguish each one; Pele finally grows so angry with him that she sends fire chasing after him into the human world. In one Diné (Navajo) story, the fire god hoards fire for himself, using it only to destroy things, until trickster Coyote steals some and gives it to humans. Among different Australian Aboriginal peoples, the origin of fire is placed with various animals, or sometimes human women, from whom it is forcibly taken through violence or trickery; it’s then distributed among the trees of the land, from where anyone can recover it. The ancient Vedic and Zoroastrian traditions are a bit different, but the fire god—Agni or Atar—is both devourer and protector. As the light of knowledge and acculturation, Agni too once hid from humans, before serving as an intermediary between humans and the gods of the Vedic pantheon.

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty

Such stories from every quarter of the planet engage with the mystery and power of fire in ways that we of industrial civilisation do not. They imagine fire as being of divine origin or imbued with some property fundamentally tied to our very humanity, the world we inhabit, or divinity. Without it, our human world is incomplete. Yet an ambivalence too surrounds fire, either through explicit acknowledgement of its dual nature as both benefactor and destroyer or an implicit association of it with an act of transgression or moral corruption. But we need it, the stories tell us; its power to cook food and to keep us warm enables our human existence. Our evolutionary story is, in fact, very deeply bound up with fire. And though no living society can possibly retain a true memory of the origins of a bond forged millions of years ago, it’s remarkable that a mythic awareness of its centrality to human societies, its powers and its dangers, remains alive among peoples who retain their cultural connection with a non-industrialised worldview.

Direct human connection to fire began as global temperatures were dropping into the Pleistocene ice age. Our early hominid ancestors in Africa had left the forest canopies, where they’d enjoyed a diet of raw leaves and fruit, seeds and insects, to explore new ways of life on the expanding open savannas. Their grassland lifestyles favored evolution toward bipedalism, along with dextrous minds and hands able to sharpen rocks into cutting implements. They must have learned they could glean good food from the charred leavings of forest fires. This accidental cooking rendered some foods easier to eat and digest, enabling these hominids to enjoy nutritious foods they might not have eaten before, like the calorifically dense tubers and corms that grew underground. This meant their bodies could receive more nutrition from food while expending less energy in processing and digesting it, because fire effectively did some of that processing and digesting for them.

Fire is a phenomenon as unique to Earth as life itself. It erupts when substances made mostly of carbon and hydrogen—fuels, like wood or oil, ultimately created by some living thing—are combined with ambient oxygen in a runaway oxidative chemical reaction, which converts them primarily into carbon-dioxide and water. The heat given off by this reaction can keep us warm in the cold or drive reactions in other substances, like in the food we eat. High heat changes the properties of our food by neutralising poisons it contained in its raw state (tubers and beans can be toxic before cooking), softening its hard parts, killing any pathogens within it, altering the structures of its proteins, and releasing nutrients for easier absorption by our guts.

The energy we take from fire is extra-somatic, meaning it comes from outside of our bodies, beyond the calories we ingest in our food. Thus, controlling fire allows us to ‘steal’ the energy released by the burning of fuel and add some of it to the energy we get from the food itself, effectively increasing the amount of energy we use in the world—both directly, in the energy of cooking, and indirectly, by enabling us to extract more food energy from the same environment through an expanded diet.

We take this for granted, but this is the magic of cooking. And it marked a fundamental transition in how our kind taps into the resources available in our ecosystems. It gave us a larger portion of energy from an environment we share with other creatures, most of whom depend entirely on energy from the food they eat to maintain their life functions. At some point—nobody knows when—human communities also began to practice controlled burns to shape and maintain ecosystems in widely beneficial ways, perhaps not so unlike the way other animals are known to shape their ecosystems by building dams (beavers), for instance, or maintaining waterholes (elephants). This became another way that humans actively co-created enriched environments, alongside other species.

When a living system uses (consumes) more energy and materials, it grows; for early humans, their increased consumption of biomass—as fuel to make fire and as food—would have caused an increase in their population size. The local ecosystem had to adjust, accommodating more Homo erectus and fewer of something else—most noticeably, perhaps, other directly competing species, like similar hominids who did not use fire. The use of fire increased the carrying capacity of the landscape for H. erectus—that is, the land could support larger populations of them living this way of life effectively forever, or at least until something else changed their environment. Perhaps no other animals have made such intensive and crafty use of extra-somatic energy as humans—nor become so existentially dependent upon it.

But that’s not all. All the ease our ancestors gained by cooking favored the evolution of new body forms with smaller guts and teeth and larger brains. Before the middle of the Pleistocene ice age, our ancestors controlled fire well enough to build cooking hearths. This suggests that, rather than eating on the spot whatever each one collected or killed, as most primates do, hominins carried their day’s bounty back to their camp, threw it onto the fire, and then shared it with their group.

Sitting around the hearth, distributing food, contesting over what was fair and who owed what to whom, suffering harassment by the greedy meanies—or collectively harassing them in retribution—social pressures favored evolution toward increasing capacities to understand and utter vocalisations that coded for more complex and nuanced information. This, in turn, enriched imaginative powers that could project one person into another’s point of view, able to visualize and contemplate encounters and experiences known only through gestural and vocal communication. Our hominin ancestors had already been teaching each other how to fashion tools, how to tend fire, perhaps even how to locate the best tubers or caches of nuts or honey. Maybe, in exchanging information about their environment by recounting their day’s exploits, they began to tell stories in language increasingly rich enough to build worlds, to articulate beliefs and rules about how to live, to profess their love or to complain about the resident bully.

Thus, while these earliest humans were developing cooking technologies that transformed their bodies, they were also growing into highly social, cooperative animals capable of teaching and learning from one another about their material and social worlds. Over tens of thousands of generations they accumulated this knowledge, passed it down from elders to youths, recounted it in tales told around the fire, listening to the sounds of the night, gazing up at a milky profusion of stars. From this they would weave threads upon threads of human stories into tapestries of meaning, eventually gathering these together and binding them, layer over layer, into all enveloping edifices of human culture—an immersive environment of stories, a universe of interconnected notions, a kind of shared delusion that models for each community their shared meanings of life, how the cosmos works, what has value, what is their rightful place in the world, what possible futures lie before them, and much else besides.

Human culture is an awe-inspiring phenomenon that has long forged meaning and purpose in conversation with our deep awareness of the planet’s biophysical reality. However—as future essays in this series will describe—in modern, industrial societies, the tether between culture and biophysical reality has become increasingly frayed; our modern culture has now become a self-referential bubble, adrift from our planet’s own life and rhythms.

When our early ancestors first learned to control fire, the ecological shift was apparently gradual. It remained sustainable for well over a million years, even as it increased human populations enough to spread out of Africa and establish themselves across ice-age Eurasia. Nevertheless, when humans entered those far-flung ecosystems, this would necessarily have destabilised them at first. It would have left them forever altered them forever by accommodating a new apex predator—human beings—on the local landscapes.

Any species that increases its number within an ecosystem ultimately changes the conditions for all other local species, because their enlarged presence changes the way that energy and materials flow through that ecosystem. But fluctuations of species within changing ecosystems are normal for living systems, which are never static. Disruptions and even occasional extinctions caused by the expansion of one species need not lead to total annihilation of ecosystems nor disintegration of the planet’s biogeochemical cycles. In fact, once an ecosystem establishes a new balance to accommodate a new species, it may ultimately become richer than it had been before. Such fluctuations are different from the phenomenon of large-scale ecosystem annihilation that marks the Anthropocene and is only a recent development, not necessarily intrinsic to our human nature or culture.

Still, one has to wonder if the stories told by the first Australians, the Diné, the Polynesians, and others, as they were expanding across the planet in their time, captured some unnamed awareness of the destabilization their presence brought to their new lands. Could that be one source of their stories’ ambivalence about fire? Was it some acknowledgment of the moral and existential dangers of mastering a force mightier than themselves? Of the disruptions they caused with its super-human power? The ancient stories may have reminded their audiences that wielding the power of fire entails responsibilities, obligating us into a system of mutual sharing and care for our environment, fundamentally tied to our own survival—a wisdom we have forgotten in our industrial age.

Next time I’ll look at the crucial role ice also plays in the human story.

Usha Alexander trained in science and anthropology. After working for years in Silicon Valley, she now lives in Gurugram. She’s written two novels: The Legend of Virinara and Only the Eyes Are Mine.