Fire use: The first signal of widespread cultural diffusion in human evolution(pnas.org)
pnas.org
Fire use: The first signal of widespread cultural diffusion in human evolution
https://www.pnas.org/content/118/31/e2101108118
33 comments
You might enjoy this film - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quest_for_Fire_(film)
I laughed so hard when I watched it. So clichéd, especially the parts where the men barely managed to survive their encounter in the cave, and were the girls of the tribe comforted them as heros afterwards :-)
Guy from Twin Peaks, girl from Commando, and Ron Perlman! Definitely worth checking out!
I read it when I was 10 and remember it very well. Great story indeed. Thanks for a memory!
I think one of the most profound intellectual insights I've had is that the myth of Prometheus was in a sense true, but described events so old--that we wouldn't event consider the "people" in the myth (the ones who received the gift of fire) as human.
It made me realize just how much of everything I have and know is inherited, and why traditional cultures revere their elders so. Especially when the world changes as slow as it used to, your elder taught you everything that mattered, and everything that mattered was handed down across millennia.
It made me realize just how much of everything I have and know is inherited, and why traditional cultures revere their elders so. Especially when the world changes as slow as it used to, your elder taught you everything that mattered, and everything that mattered was handed down across millennia.
Expanding from fire a bit, and stretching the idea of culture from what we think of it as now to something more like learned group behavior, this gets us to Jungian ideas about the collective unconscious. We today have myths and patterns revealed by the stories we tell in cultures across the world which are older than Homo Sapiens and maybe even older than Primates entirely.
People say our collective myths about dragons--flying fire breathing serpents--come from some ancient amalgamation of innate fear of large birds (which would have been predators to small mammals from which we evolved) combined with fear of snakes and other reptiles (same), and all with a healthy dash of the danger and power of fire.
We've been social animals living in (albeit small) social groups for 10s of millions of years with all sorts of accoutrements including functioning hierarchies, acting in ways suited to our environments, knowledge to be able to find food and raise young and so on.
For reference here, homo sapiens is from about 200kya, diverged from our closest relatives (chimps/bonobos) about 8000kya, and primates have been around for 80000kya. And that's just primates.
This stuff is crazy old, unfathomably old.
People say our collective myths about dragons--flying fire breathing serpents--come from some ancient amalgamation of innate fear of large birds (which would have been predators to small mammals from which we evolved) combined with fear of snakes and other reptiles (same), and all with a healthy dash of the danger and power of fire.
We've been social animals living in (albeit small) social groups for 10s of millions of years with all sorts of accoutrements including functioning hierarchies, acting in ways suited to our environments, knowledge to be able to find food and raise young and so on.
For reference here, homo sapiens is from about 200kya, diverged from our closest relatives (chimps/bonobos) about 8000kya, and primates have been around for 80000kya. And that's just primates.
This stuff is crazy old, unfathomably old.
What the word "dragon" even describes turns out to be incredibly vague across cultures. Some dragons have wings, some don't. Some have four limbs, some have two limbs, a few might even have none. Some have scales, some have feathers. Some are serpentine, some not. Some are vast eldritch beings that circle the world-tree, some hide in tombs and hoard piles of gold. Dragons don't even always breathe fire.
The only commonalities dragons seem to possess across cultures are being terrifyingly dangerous and at least vaguely reptilian (edit: and maybe flight but I'm not sure.) There's enough room in the margins to include a vast assortment of otherwise unrelated mythological beings and say "these are all dragons, these are all basically the same thing."
The only commonalities dragons seem to possess across cultures are being terrifyingly dangerous and at least vaguely reptilian (edit: and maybe flight but I'm not sure.) There's enough room in the margins to include a vast assortment of otherwise unrelated mythological beings and say "these are all dragons, these are all basically the same thing."
> People say our collective myths about dragons--flying fire breathing serpents--come from some ancient amalgamation of innate fear of large birds (which would have been predators to small mammals from which we evolved) combined with fear of snakes and other reptiles (same), and all with a healthy dash of the danger and power of fire.
Or just dinosaur skeletons laying around and boys trying to impress
Or just dinosaur skeletons laying around and boys trying to impress
Apart from the bit where humans go from not having fire to having fire - the premise - what in the Prometheus myth do you believe reflects reality? The myth doesn't even really talk about humans, just gods.
As mentioned in another comment, Quest for Fire is a great film that tries to explain exactly this.
It follows the path of a group of Neanderthals in Paleolithic Europe (80,000 years ago), that try to tame fire, and their contact with homo-sapiens and other humanoid species.
It is outdated/inaccurate, given our today's knowledge, but We know The authors tried to do as much justice as they could, given the knowledge of the time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quest_for_Fire_(film)
It was one of those slow but very captivating movies of the era. Movies like this (both indy feel and very high quality), are just are not made anymore.
It follows the path of a group of Neanderthals in Paleolithic Europe (80,000 years ago), that try to tame fire, and their contact with homo-sapiens and other humanoid species.
It is outdated/inaccurate, given our today's knowledge, but We know The authors tried to do as much justice as they could, given the knowledge of the time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quest_for_Fire_(film)
It was one of those slow but very captivating movies of the era. Movies like this (both indy feel and very high quality), are just are not made anymore.
which parts are outdated/inaccurate? Wiki mentions the mixture of different levels of advancement, which might be a good point modulo Sentinelese
Neanderthals are portrait as bit too primitive, and we know now that they were fully capable of speech, and not just grunts...
"Neanderthals possessed a modern vocal tract and were therefore capable of fully modern speech."
"Neanderthals possessed a modern vocal tract and were therefore capable of fully modern speech."
Bad day for the rest of the animals when humans first learned to control fire. Pretty much game over.
Now we are using advancements in our control over energy resources to make it so earth is unable to sustain human life.
Ah yes, that explains why there are 7.6 billion humans now.
Give it another 50-100 years.
Once we learn to control antimatter it will be bad day for the Galaxy.
>lead us to hypothesize that at the latest by 400,000 y ago, hominin subpopulations encountered one another often enough and were sufficiently tolerant toward one another to transmit ideas and techniques over large regions within relatively short time periods.
The study suggests pretty "rosy" cultural diffusion. Would say capturing/kidnapping and forcing to divulge the secret qualify as sufficiently tolerant transmission of ideas? Imagine the smell of cooking meat coming from the other side of the valley while you're chewing on a piece of raw meat under the cold rain :)
I wonder can it instead of "transmission" be that the fire-capable just out-competed the rest and dominantly spread all over the place as a result.
Another possible interpretation is "genetic transmission" instead of "cultural transmission" like it is suggested for the stone tools here (while i don't agree with such hypothesis (pity as it leads to a lot of interesting conclusions, including ones about modern world), people do write scientific articles on it)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5066817/#:~:tex...
>lead us to hypothesize that at the latest by 400,000 y ago, hominin subpopulations encountered one another often enough and were sufficiently tolerant toward one another to transmit ideas and techniques over large regions within relatively short time periods.
The study suggests pretty "rosy" cultural diffusion. Would say capturing/kidnapping and forcing to divulge the secret qualify as sufficiently tolerant transmission of ideas? Imagine the smell of cooking meat coming from the other side of the valley while you're chewing on a piece of raw meat under the cold rain :)
I wonder can it instead of "transmission" be that the fire-capable just out-competed the rest and dominantly spread all over the place as a result.
Another possible interpretation is "genetic transmission" instead of "cultural transmission" like it is suggested for the stone tools here (while i don't agree with such hypothesis (pity as it leads to a lot of interesting conclusions, including ones about modern world), people do write scientific articles on it)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5066817/#:~:tex...
The myth of the peace-loving "noble savage" is persistent and pernicious. Indeed, for the last fifty years, most popular and scholarly works have agreed that prehistoric warfare was rare, harmless, unimportant, and, like smallpox, a disease of civilized societies alone.
Lawrence Keeley's groundbreaking War Before Civilization offers a devastating rebuttal to such comfortable myths and debunks the notion that warfare was introduced to primitive societies through contact with civilization (an idea he denounces as "the pacification of the past").[1]
[1] https://www.amazon.com/War-Before-Civilization-Peaceful-Sava...
Lawrence Keeley's groundbreaking War Before Civilization offers a devastating rebuttal to such comfortable myths and debunks the notion that warfare was introduced to primitive societies through contact with civilization (an idea he denounces as "the pacification of the past").[1]
[1] https://www.amazon.com/War-Before-Civilization-Peaceful-Sava...
I agree with your main point that prehistoric warfare and violence was not rare.
I'm not sure I'd frame it as most scholarly works getting this wrong. Almost all scholarship I've encountered in the last 25 years agrees with the position that both prehistoric warfare was common and that relationships between hunter gather societies often included violence. There is an open question of exactly how violent (extremely violent, frequently violent), but one would be hard pressed to find credible scholars arguing that mass violence was almost unheard of in pre-history.
Going all the way back to John Locke in the 18th Century and before that to Biblical understandings of pre-history there was a notion that past human arrangements were extremely violent. There was some trendy early and mid 20th Century scholarship that attempted to argue that mass violence was a disease of the civilized societies, but such arguments were, as far as I can tell, only fashionable because they rejected the assumed status-quo.
I'm not sure I'd frame it as most scholarly works getting this wrong. Almost all scholarship I've encountered in the last 25 years agrees with the position that both prehistoric warfare was common and that relationships between hunter gather societies often included violence. There is an open question of exactly how violent (extremely violent, frequently violent), but one would be hard pressed to find credible scholars arguing that mass violence was almost unheard of in pre-history.
Going all the way back to John Locke in the 18th Century and before that to Biblical understandings of pre-history there was a notion that past human arrangements were extremely violent. There was some trendy early and mid 20th Century scholarship that attempted to argue that mass violence was a disease of the civilized societies, but such arguments were, as far as I can tell, only fashionable because they rejected the assumed status-quo.
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>I wonder can it instead of "transmission" be that the fire-capable just out-competed the rest and dominantly spread all over the place as a result
One argument against that is that transmission is much more frequent than replacement in human history. We have countless examples of technologies (agriculture and writing notably) being transmitted to different cultures, whereas the examples of cultures out-competing and replacing others through technology are rare.
One argument against that is that transmission is much more frequent than replacement in human history. We have countless examples of technologies (agriculture and writing notably) being transmitted to different cultures, whereas the examples of cultures out-competing and replacing others through technology are rare.
That's exactly what happened in Europe, though:
Farmers moved in from the near East and replaced previous populations of hunters gatherers.
Farmers moved in from the near East and replaced previous populations of hunters gatherers.
There is a continuum between transmission and replacement.
The Japanese adopting democracy after WWII was almost pure transmission; the population stayed basically the same.
The Holocaust was almost pure replacement; only a few people from mixed families survived in some areas.
But "something in between" is much more typical. Contemporary Iran is as much a heir to ancient Persia as it is to the Arab conquest and Islamization. Roman conquest of Britain led to a significant population admixture from the rest of the Empire and Romanization of local Celts at the same time. Expansion of Germans through Central and Eastern Europe in 12th-18th century was a thorough mix of replacement and transmission.
The Japanese adopting democracy after WWII was almost pure transmission; the population stayed basically the same.
The Holocaust was almost pure replacement; only a few people from mixed families survived in some areas.
But "something in between" is much more typical. Contemporary Iran is as much a heir to ancient Persia as it is to the Arab conquest and Islamization. Roman conquest of Britain led to a significant population admixture from the rest of the Empire and Romanization of local Celts at the same time. Expansion of Germans through Central and Eastern Europe in 12th-18th century was a thorough mix of replacement and transmission.
>the examples of cultures out-competing and replacing others through technology are rare
Alexander the Great - phalanx with resulting spread of Greek culture over all the Middle East, Roman Empire - countless advantages over the cultures they dominated, Vikings - sea faring ships and navigation, Columbus+/Americas and the whole colonial period across the world, ...
Alexander the Great - phalanx with resulting spread of Greek culture over all the Middle East, Roman Empire - countless advantages over the cultures they dominated, Vikings - sea faring ships and navigation, Columbus+/Americas and the whole colonial period across the world, ...
I used the word culture but I really meant population in the sense that the original commenter used it (i.e. a group of people replacing or displacing another, rather than imposing their customs on another).
Except for the last one, you're describing transmission not replacement.
We would see genetic evidence of that, but it's missing. So cultural diffusion is most likely.
Game over for other animals was the developer of cognitive abilities and invention of speech. That allowed humans to kill all competing predators and megafauna, even without fire.
One of the things I find most bewildering about evolution is that there must have been a significant period of time where our ancestors were actually predators that competed with chimpanzees...and yet both of our lines have survived. Was it a violent time in human history, or did we learn how to get along?
Idk about chimpanzee, but we have been at war with baboons.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cph0D7Vdjp4
https://youtu.be/TAGjuRwx_Y8?t=429
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cph0D7Vdjp4
https://youtu.be/TAGjuRwx_Y8?t=429
Fire and agriculture fundamentally changed human evolution to the point where most humans won’t survive without fire or agriculture
So fire was the first meme?
As a child, I surely enjoyed this story and would recommend it to anyone.