Taming Fire

The use of fire demonstrates prehistoric people’s ability to adapt to their environment in many ways. Fire was part of early human’s life and one of the things that they couldn’t understand. Fire destroyed trees, dry fields and even animals. After a wildfire early humans would scavenge the grounds. Sometimes they would find roasted animals as treats, and this intrigued them even more to find out about fire and its effects. Of course, cooked meat tastes a lot better than raw meat. The heat also destroys toxins, gets rid of all parasites, and makes the meat a lot easier to digest. An early human decided to experiment with fire. After discovering what it could potentially do, early humans used fire in many ways to adapt to their environment. Fire made heat, to keep early humans warm on cold winter nights. It enabled early humans to migrate from warm South Africa to Europe. Fire also produced light, so that the early humans had a longer day and more time to gather together and create oral tradition, tell stories, religion, and start history. Fire also helped early humans with cooking their food, which makes it healthier and tastier to eat. Fire kept predators and animal threats to humans away, since just as the early humans had been before the predators of the different biomes were afraid of fire. However, early humans also had to adapt to fire. Fire isn’t only positive, it’s quite dangerous. Since it wasn’t obvious to the early humans how fire was made, they would gather smoldering wood to their campsites, and make fire. Early humans learned to make a hearth, a ring of stones, to keep the fire in one place and not let it spread. Not only was the hearth a lot safer, it was also a lot more practical. With a hearth early humans could leave the fire burning over night without having to watch over it, and a hearth is also a lot warmer than a wildfire or a fire that isn’t only fixed to one place. Since wildfires are more spread out, move and run out of food they aren’t as warm as the controlled fires in the early human’s settlements. These fires in the hearths were more contained and controlled, and if the wood supply was low the early humans would just add another chunk. Hearths were found regularly throughout a quarter of million years ago.