Use of fire

About a million years ago the controlled use of fire was achieved. Firebrands from lightning strikes carried to other sites bestowed enormous advantages on all aspects of our ancestors’ existence. The control of fire improved the yield of meat, allowing more animals to be flushed and trapped. Animals killed by the brush fire were also often cooked by it. And even in the earliest days of the carnivorous Homo, the advantage of meat, sinews, and bone made more easily rendered and consumed, had significant consequences. In later evolution, the mastication and physiology of digestion evolved to favor cooked meat and vegetables. Cooking became thereafter a universal human trait. And with cooking came shared meals and powerful means of social bonding.

Firebrands carried about from one place to another have always been a vital resource, comparable to meat, fruit, and weapons. Tree limbs and bundles of twigs can smolder for hours. With meat, fire, and cooking campsites could last for more than a few days at a time, persistent enough to be guarded as a refuge. Such a nest, as it can be called in the language of zoology, is the precursor to the attainment of eurosociality in all other known animal species. There is evidence of fossil campsites and their accountrements as far back as Homo erectus, the ancestral species intermediate in brain size between Homo habilis and Modern Homo sapiens. ~ Page 115