"Fire" from Lilly to Dory

Pulled an almost all-nighter last night studying for my earth science lab final. At six o'clock this morning I was prepared to fill in all sorts of graphs and charts, calculate great circle distances between two points, and analyze detrital and chemical composition. I got to the test to find I had completely over-studied; the test consisted of five short paragraph-style questions, and I was in and out of there in less than thirty minutes.

However frustrating and largely useless, my study session (particularly the section on rocks and minerals) did serve to remind me of a hypothesis I came up with quite a while ago, while I was reading "The Kin." In the book, the characters often make and use, for practical as well as ritualistic purposes, something called a "cutter." In the anthropology world, this "cutter" is known as a projectile point: a tool formed from a rock by chipping flakes away to create a sharp edge. "Projectile point" is the broad label for any such tool, and can include knives, hand axes, spear and arrow points.

The book's characters are labeled by the author to be the earliest modern humans. Though I have found that label to be a misnomer, I have so far found them to be extremely accurate representations of Homo erectus: the direct predecessor to modern humans. This is surprising to me because this book was written in the 1920's - before the the first discovered Homo erectus skeleton had even been confirmed and there was still debate going on over whether Homo habilis was bipedal.

It's important to remember that while Homo erectus was not the first human ancestor to make "cutters," they were the first to discover how to make fire - something that truly set them apart from their earlier counterparts, Homo habilis, who did use fire when found in nature and could even store it, but couldn't make it on their own. This got me wondering: how did Homo erectus first figure out how to make fire?

There is a film from the 1970's (a sarcastically labeled, "classic" by my anthro professor) called "Quest for Fire." The film follows a group of Neanderthals as they search for a new source of fire after their precious store has been stolen by a rivaling tribe. Eventually the Neanderthals meet up with some Homo erectus who show them how to make fire by twirling a stick against a flat piece of wood. Though many anthropologists find this model laughable at best, there is no real evidence to prove fire was not first made with wood, as wood artifacts that old generally don't survive. However, something has occurred to me that seems more likely to follow the course of natural progression, and it's something that is really not all that uncommon when it comes to human discoveries: fire happened by accident.

The clue lies with the "cutter." The best rocks for making such a tool are fine-grained, as opposed to course. The majority of found projectile points are made of flint or obsidian. Both of these rock types, when fractured, break off in very neat and predictable flakes and form very sharp edges. It just so happens that the best spark-making rocks are also those with a fine grain, flint in particular. The way I see it, it was only a matter of time before a group of Homo erectus found themselves in an area rich in fine-grained rocks, sat down to make a cutter, and it made a spark.

This must have been something noticed by others as well, earlier humans included. But only Homo erectus had the brain power to make the connection, and more importantly, spread the information.

An article I read recently, titled "Fire out of Africa," hypothesizes that the discovery of fire-making gave groups of Homo erectus a revolutionary boost of confidence. Fire provides protection from predators, warmth, the ability to cook meat. It may have allowed individuals and groups to travel further than they ever had before and even may have sparked - pun intended- the African exodus itself.

. . .

Now for a related, and rather interesting factoid: there has been research done by a group of Cambridge University students concerning the relation between the development of speech in early humans and tool-making. The study involved one student silently demonstrating how to make various tool-like objects to a group of others who were to watch and then reproduce the product, all without speaking to each other. The test was to determine whether speech is required for such learning. For simpler wooden tools, such as carved wood spear points, they found no verbal communication necessary. But for stone tools, such as projectile points, they found speech to be imperative to learning the techniques. They have hypothesized that this proves that Homo habilis, the first stone-tool making early human, must have therefore had the capability of speech.

Love,

Lilly