Have you ever thought about who actually invented fire?
I mean humans and how they discovered that fire could be an advantage to their survival.
Let’s get into this then.
So, who invented the fire?
So Who Invented the Fire?
Well…
People today have been investigating just that. I feel that we should know as fire has changed our existence.
Without the findings of fire, I am positive it was accidental.
Human Society would not be where we are today, or even if we might be here at all?
So far…
And I do say so far, for the reason is that we are making new discoveries all the time about history, and there might be some discoveries that we have not found as yet.
The oldest fire recorded on Earth so far has been identified from charcoal that has been left in rocks that were formed during the late Silurian Period, this was around 420 million years ago.
Now, the earliest known traces of controlled fire were found at the Daughters of Jacob Bridge, Israel, and this was dated as far back as 790,000 years ago.
Now that is a long time ago…
There are religious or animist notions that have been connected to fire that are assumed.
And I am saying assumed, to reach back to such early pre-Homo sapiens times.
Archaeologists Wil Roebroeks of Leiden University in the Netherlands and Paola Villa of the University of Colorado Museum.
Had indeed found such found evidence for the frequent use of fire by European Neanderthals between the times of 400,000 and 300,000 years ago
What the Experts Do Know So Far
Is that around 400,000 years ago, fires had started popping up much more frequently in the archaeological record across the:
- Middle East
- Europe
- Africa
- Asia
And according to a 2016 review article in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.
Such experts consider these fires to have been widespread.
However, discoveries still need to be carried on as history has a way of revealing itself to us with each discovery, which we either find or accidentally come across.
So far the up-to-date evidence is through sites, and this evidence is still relatively scarce.
I am sure that such discoveries will be turned on their head at some time or the other, as we progress with our technology such as the ability to now scan through the earth by satellite.
It has made things so much easier than we can discover things that we would never have found so quickly without it.
So far there are at least two isolated sites showing that early humans were indeed using fire before 400,000 years ago, Tattersall has said.
There is a site in Israel, that is dating back about 800,000 years.
Archaeologists have found at this site flint, hearths and burned wood fragments, according to a 2012 study in the journal Science.
There is another site, that is called Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa.
Now scientists have found evidence that humans have harnessed and indeed used fire about 1 million years ago, according to a 2012 study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
And in that cave alone, they found the remnants of burned plants and bone and what appear to be hearths.
If you do not know what a hearth is, a fireplace hearth is the floor area within a fireplace itself.
Apparently, the evidence is coming from is really at the far back of the cave, they were not stupid, were they?
If you had a fire at the entrance of the cave, the elements such as the wind could blow it out and the temperature of the fire would also not be efficient to warm them as it would in the confines of the back of that cave.
Where the heat of the fire would hang around and be more so contained.
And not only that, but being in the back of the cave would also give them an advantage of safety from wild animals at night.
They would be able to see the wild animals approaching and therefore be prepared to defend themselves.
I am sure that they would also have worked out that having a fire on a stick can help ward off predators as well.
Even a landscape fire that is sweeping around is not going to reach that far back in the cave.
So there is little chance that the data is a fluke, even though it is isolated in space and time they have to go on the evidence shown to them.
Though Wonderwerk is considered the earliest site so far, most experts would agree humans had harnessed fire for themselves.
In theory, they most probably would have been using it much earlier.
Around 2 million years ago, the gut of our human ancestor Homo erectus began shrinking, now this is suggesting that something such as cooking would have been making digestion a lot easier.
Eating raw vegetation or meat would have consumed more energy and also harder for the stomach to break down.
Meanwhile, as the brain of early man was growing, thanks to the fire which was making the consumption of meats being eaten and digested easier and quicker which required a lot of energy.
This in turn made our brains start to develop bigger.
To also back up this argument, Hlubik is also looking for signs of ancient controlled fires at sites in Koobi Fora, a region in northern Kenya that is rich in paleoanthropological remains dating back about 1.6 million years.
So far, she has apparently found burned bones clustered with other artefacts there as well.
The burned sediment was actually clustered separately, which is suggesting that there was one area for maintaining fire and there was another area where our ancient humans spent most of their time.
However, as humans go, not all experts agree with Hlubik.
The fires at the site that she had excavated may not have been started by humans at all.
They could just be bushfires that had been started by lightning or some other natural circumstance…
Fire has a lot to do with us as human beings being where we are today.
It most probably lengthened early man’s life spans for one, as the consumption of food was made easier leaving man free to not have to look for food so often.
Therefore they could use this time for advancement and thought processes.
The gathering around the heat of the fire made humans more social by giving them a place to gather around.
And with their advancement of thought, the invention of clothing would have helped them move into colder climates that they otherwise could have not before.
The use of fires also most likely increased human cognition as well.
The question of who invented the fire?
The fire was always around us but it is the harnessing of fire that is most probably one of the greatest feats of early man, and the ability to respect it and handle it with care.