Walking with fire
I wish that the BBC or Discover would produce Walking With Fire, about the history of fire on Earth from the Devonian to the present and beyond, with Stephen J. Pyne narrating and explaining fire's role in the ecology of Earth's biosphere and its relationship to all Earth's creatures, including us
The very first fires on Earth came about in the Devonian Period of the Paleozoic Era of the Phanerozoic Eon of Earth's history. It was during the Devonian that the first plants to colonize the land appeared -- and only then, out of the water, that lightning could strike fire from land life. Combustion was born on Earth in the first lightning strike to touch off as fire on land, where oxygen was available in the atmosphere to support combustion; the cold, smothering weight of the waters of the world could not smother that fire; and the fuels in the form of drried plant life were available for it. Pyne calls this "First Fire," natural fire, set by random accident.
Second Fire, fire brought about via deliberate action and artifice, however, required land life like us for its creation. Coming late in Earth's life, Second Fire first appeared very early in the history of the hominids -- our ancestors -- some two million years ago. In his Fire: A Brief History (Cycle of Fire Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books), Pyne describes an African cave in which a huge trove of ancient bones lies stacked against a back wall. About halfway up that small mountain of bones is a horizontal line of charcoal. Below that line, all the bones bear the toothmarks of some huge animal with extremely strong jaws, probably hyenas -- and, indeed, there are no hyena bones among them -- but there are plenty of ruined homid bones, clearly well-gnawed by the big predators that had dragged their remains into the cave for leisurely dining. Above that line are more bones -- all of them cooked. None of them are hominid bones -- but there are plenty of hyena bones in among them.
That telltale line of charcoal dates to about 1.8 million years ago. It is the collective remains of cooking fires used on a level hearth at about that same height. Our ancestors used fire at least that far back, and perhaps a hundred thousand years or more before that. With the taming of fire we became human; as far as is known, no other creature on Earth has ever tamed fire. The first Second Fire probably came about when a young, frisky teenage male hominid saw that a forest fire in his neighborhood was dying down, and he went to investigate. There he found a long branch fallen from a burned tree; fire danced gleefully at one end of the branch. He picked it up by the other end. Hmmm . . . A few minutes later he was chasing the teenaged girl hominids in his clan around with his blazing branch held high; the girls squealed and giggled and "ran from" him . . . hoping he'd continue to chase them.
Then his mother saw what he was doing. Hmmm . . . "Give me that!" And she grabbed the branch, took it back to the cave, and built a little fire out in front where there were some sticks and branches lying on the ground, drying out over the summer. Wasn't there a wildfire a few months ago that had left the bodies of some unfortunate animals lying in the ashes, cooked but not burned through? And didn't their meat taste wonderful? Let's see what we can do with this thing . . .
And so the use of Second Fire for cooking was born. And from then on, the foods we ate, well-cooked in our fires and in our water-filled stewing holes in the ground -- we threw fire-hot stones into the water along with the food, and the boiling water made a savory stew -- required less and less chewing. Our old folks and very young children and our sick ones didn't starve because they didn't have the strength to chew those diamond-hard roots and vegetables and fruits and nobody wanted to chew their food for them; and our adults didn't crack their teeth chewing those hard foods. Our huge jaw-muscles became smaller and more delicate by the century, allowing our brain-cases to expand all out of bounds. And so we grew the brains to go with our fiery nature, and became today's modern humans. Our Gods came to include Gods of Fire -- Vulcan, Loki, Hephaestos, Hades, Vesta, Hestia, Agni, countless others. For by fire we became extraordinarily powerful, only a few rungs below the Gods, and all our history we have been accompanied by fire.
And then we invented Third Fire -- industrial fire and internal combustionm, the forge and the automobile -- and Fourth Fire -- nuclear fire. And with that, the bridge to the stars lay open to us, the spirits of the Universe beckoning to us to join them out there . . .
Pyne would be perfect for the narrator of such a "Walking With" series. I wish I wish I wish . . .
The very first fires on Earth came about in the Devonian Period of the Paleozoic Era of the Phanerozoic Eon of Earth's history. It was during the Devonian that the first plants to colonize the land appeared -- and only then, out of the water, that lightning could strike fire from land life. Combustion was born on Earth in the first lightning strike to touch off as fire on land, where oxygen was available in the atmosphere to support combustion; the cold, smothering weight of the waters of the world could not smother that fire; and the fuels in the form of drried plant life were available for it. Pyne calls this "First Fire," natural fire, set by random accident.
Second Fire, fire brought about via deliberate action and artifice, however, required land life like us for its creation. Coming late in Earth's life, Second Fire first appeared very early in the history of the hominids -- our ancestors -- some two million years ago. In his Fire: A Brief History (Cycle of Fire Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books), Pyne describes an African cave in which a huge trove of ancient bones lies stacked against a back wall. About halfway up that small mountain of bones is a horizontal line of charcoal. Below that line, all the bones bear the toothmarks of some huge animal with extremely strong jaws, probably hyenas -- and, indeed, there are no hyena bones among them -- but there are plenty of ruined homid bones, clearly well-gnawed by the big predators that had dragged their remains into the cave for leisurely dining. Above that line are more bones -- all of them cooked. None of them are hominid bones -- but there are plenty of hyena bones in among them.
That telltale line of charcoal dates to about 1.8 million years ago. It is the collective remains of cooking fires used on a level hearth at about that same height. Our ancestors used fire at least that far back, and perhaps a hundred thousand years or more before that. With the taming of fire we became human; as far as is known, no other creature on Earth has ever tamed fire. The first Second Fire probably came about when a young, frisky teenage male hominid saw that a forest fire in his neighborhood was dying down, and he went to investigate. There he found a long branch fallen from a burned tree; fire danced gleefully at one end of the branch. He picked it up by the other end. Hmmm . . . A few minutes later he was chasing the teenaged girl hominids in his clan around with his blazing branch held high; the girls squealed and giggled and "ran from" him . . . hoping he'd continue to chase them.
Then his mother saw what he was doing. Hmmm . . . "Give me that!" And she grabbed the branch, took it back to the cave, and built a little fire out in front where there were some sticks and branches lying on the ground, drying out over the summer. Wasn't there a wildfire a few months ago that had left the bodies of some unfortunate animals lying in the ashes, cooked but not burned through? And didn't their meat taste wonderful? Let's see what we can do with this thing . . .
And so the use of Second Fire for cooking was born. And from then on, the foods we ate, well-cooked in our fires and in our water-filled stewing holes in the ground -- we threw fire-hot stones into the water along with the food, and the boiling water made a savory stew -- required less and less chewing. Our old folks and very young children and our sick ones didn't starve because they didn't have the strength to chew those diamond-hard roots and vegetables and fruits and nobody wanted to chew their food for them; and our adults didn't crack their teeth chewing those hard foods. Our huge jaw-muscles became smaller and more delicate by the century, allowing our brain-cases to expand all out of bounds. And so we grew the brains to go with our fiery nature, and became today's modern humans. Our Gods came to include Gods of Fire -- Vulcan, Loki, Hephaestos, Hades, Vesta, Hestia, Agni, countless others. For by fire we became extraordinarily powerful, only a few rungs below the Gods, and all our history we have been accompanied by fire.
And then we invented Third Fire -- industrial fire and internal combustionm, the forge and the automobile -- and Fourth Fire -- nuclear fire. And with that, the bridge to the stars lay open to us, the spirits of the Universe beckoning to us to join them out there . . .
Pyne would be perfect for the narrator of such a "Walking With" series. I wish I wish I wish . . .