Fire: Remaking the World, Remaking Ourselves

Prometheus stealing fire to give to man (Jan Cossiers, 1600-1671)

By Thomas Neuburger

From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State” —Randall Jarrell, “Death of the Ball Turret Gunner”

This is the second in our series on the nature of the state and James C. Scott’s Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States. Our first part is here.

The Story So Far

Humans, for millions of years, lived in tribal communities. These groups, like all human groups, had structure, but nothing dramatic, nothing like masters and slaves or workers and kings. Nothing systemically coersive. This hierarchy was mild because people could walk away, take family and cousins and leave. Social life depended more on agreement than force. There were no coersive states with their monopolies on violence.

Two additional facts:

• Tribes and similar groups had a mix of structures, a smorgasbord of ways to organize themselves, often created by a process called “schismogenesis” (David Graeber again). Life in some tribes was dramatically different from others; no one structure was “natural” and always selected.

• Between the first instances of settled human life and the birth of the earliest states, millennia passed. Literally. For four or five thousand years, humans who more-or-less stayed in much the same place, and got much of their food from something like agriculture, did NOT create coercive states. That’s a very long time. So much for the inevitability of state formation, and the (assumed) connection between agriculture and states. As we’ll see later, only certain crops (like grain) could be used to compel state formation.

Thus, contrary to popular belief, the development of coersive states was not a necessary outcome of sedentary life, nor did it depend on agriculture. In parts of the world where the first states did evolve, this was just one way of many to organize life.

What made state life spread? Why is almost everyone living now subject to states? A topic for another day, though the spread of the state-controlled West to America offers a clue. (Hint: Human concentration, the ”domus,” is a feast for disease.)

Against the Grain

To understand the state as a structure, anthropologist James C. Scott examined its origin and nature in a book titled Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest State.” Wikipedia:

Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States is a 2017 book by James C. Scott that sets out to undermine what he calls the “standard civilizational narrative” that suggests humans chose to live settled lives based on intensive agriculture because this made people safer and more prosperous. Instead, he argues, people had to be forced to live in the early states, which were hierarchical, beset by malnutrition and disease, and often based on slavery. The book has been praised for re-opening some of the biggest questions in human history. A review in Science concludes that the book’s thesis “is fascinating and represents an alternative, nuanced, if somewhat speculative, scenario on how civilized society came into being.”

In our first piece discussing this book, we said our examination would follow its chapters. So we start with human control of fire and its consequences.

The Anthropocene Starts with Fire

Scott starts with the debate surrounding the Anthropocene, a proposed new geological epoch “during which the activities of humans became decisive in affecting the world’s ecosystems and atmosphere.” When did the Anthropocene start? The options include: roughly now, with our temperature spike; with the first nuclear tests and radiation debris; or at the start of the Industrial Revolution.

But if you think about a planet, as it were, minding its own business until humans evolved, at what point did humans start reshaping the world — not just a creek, like beavers, but the planet itself? Scott’s answer: the point at which we began domestication, deliberately and at scale.

And that point begins with fire.

Fire, which we owe to our older relative Homo erectus, has been our great trump card, allowing us to resculpt the landscape so as to encourage food-bearing plants—nut and fruit trees, berry bushes—and to create browse that would attract desirable prey. In cooking, fire rendered a host of previously indigestible plants both palatable and more nutritious. We owe our relatively large brain and relatively small gut (compared with other mammals, including primates), it is claimed, to the external predigestive help that cooking provides. (Preface)

Control of fire is the gift of our ancestor species, the long-lived Homo erectus. There is evidence that erectus had fire at least 400,000 years ago, if not a lot earlier.

Fire, Food and Brains

Fire made us kings. From Scott’s Chapter 1:

What fire meant for hominids and ultimately for the rest of the natural world is presaged vividly by a cave excavation in South Africa. At the deepest and therefore oldest strata, there are no carbon deposits and hence no fire. Here one finds full skeletal remains of large cats and fragmentary bone shards—bearing tooth marks—of many fauna, among which is Homo erectus. At a higher, later stratum, one finds carbon deposits signifying fire. Here, there are full skeletal remains of Homo erectus and fragmentary bone shards of various mammals, reptiles, and birds, among which are a few gnawed bones of large cats. The change in cave “ownership” and the reversal in who was apparently eating whom testify eloquently to the power of fire for the species that first learned to use it. At the very least, fire provided warmth, light, and relative safety from nocturnal predators as well as a precursor to the domus or hearth. The case for the use of fire being the decisive transformation in the fortunes of hominids is convincing. It has been mankind’s oldest and greatest tool for reshaping the natural world. “Tool,” however, is not quite the right word; unlike an inanimate knife, fire has a life of its own. It is, at best, a “semidomesticate,” appearing unbidden and, if not guarded carefully, escaping its shackles to become dangerously feral.

Man-made fire, even in pre-history days, had a huge effect on the planet. Scott calls it “environmental landscaping”:

The effects of anthropogenic fire are so massive that they might be judged, in an evenhanded account of the human impact on the natural world, to overwhelm crop and livestock domestications. Why human fire as landscape architect doesn’t register as it ought to in our historical accounts is perhaps that its effects were spread over hundreds of millennia and were accomplished by “precivilized” peoples also known as “savages.” In our age of dynamite and bulldozers, it was a very slow-motion sort of environmental landscaping. But its aggregate effects were momentous. Our ancestors could not have failed to notice how natural wildfires transformed the landscape: how they cleared old vegetation and encouraged a host of quick-colonizing grasses and shrubs, many bearing desired seeds, berries, fruits, and nuts. They could also not have failed to notice that a fire drove fleeing game from its path, exposed hidden burrows and nests of small game, and, most important, later stimulated the browse and mushrooms that attracted grazing prey. Native North Americans deployed fire to sculpt landscapes favored by elk, deer, beaver, hare, porcupine, ruffed grouse, turkey, and quail, all of which they hunted. The game they subsequently bagged represented a kind of harvesting of prey animals they had deliberately assembled by carefully creating a habitat they would find enticing. Quite apart from being the designers of hunting grounds—veritable game parks—early humans used fire to hunt large game. The evidence suggests that long before the bow and arrow appeared, roughly twenty thousand years ago, hominids were using fire to drive herd animals off precipices and to drive elephants into bogs where, immobilized, they could more easily be killed. Fire was the key to humankind’s growing sway over the natural world—a species monopoly and trump card, worldwide. The Amazonian rain forest bears indelible traces of the use of fire to clear land and open the canopy; Australia’s eucalyptus landscape is, to a considerable degree, the effect of human fire. The volume of such landscaping in North America was such that when it stopped abruptly, due to the devastating epidemics that came with the European, the newly unchecked growth of forest cover created the illusion among white settlers that North America was a virtually untouched, primeval forest. According to some climatologists, the cold spell known as the Little Ice Age, from roughly 1500 to 1850, may well have been due to the reduction of CO2—a greenhouse gas—brought about by the die-off of North America’s indigenous fire farmers.

In other words, fire-sculpted landscape made hunting and gathering easier by reducing the “radius of a meal.” We dominate fire; fire shapes the natural world; that world feeds humans the food we need to live. One should never forget how important this “tool” was in human evolution.

In the ancient Greek tale, when Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to man, humans were never the same. Zeus was so angry that men could now challenge the gods that he punished Prometheus severely.

In later retellings (Shelley’s Frankenstein, for example), the gift of fire is treated symbolically: the real gift, we’re told, was technology, science and civilized life itself.

But that part’s not true. Fire didn’t just symbolize control — fire was control. It was fire itself that let Homo erectus become us. No fire, no Homo sapiens.

Fire Remakes Its Master

Chimpanzees have large guts. They need them to process raw food. With fire, humans externalized much of their internal digestion, making conversion of food much more efficient. Scott:

It is virtually impossible to exaggerate the importance of cooking in human evolution. The application of fire to raw food externalizes the digestive process; it gelatinizes starch and denatures protein. The chemical disassembly of raw food, which in a chimpanzee requires a gut roughly three times the size of ours, allows Homo sapiens to eat far less food and expend far fewer calories extracting nutrition from it. The effects are enormous. It allowed early man to gather and eat a far wider range of foods than before: plants with thorns, thick skins, and bark could be opened, peeled, and detoxified by cooking; hard seeds and fibrous foods that would not have repaid the caloric costs of digesting them became palatable; the flesh and guts of small birds and rodents could be sterilized. Even before the advent of cooking, Homo sapiens was a broad-spectrum omnivore, pounding, grinding, mashing, fermenting, and pickling raw meat and plants, but with fire, the range of foods she could digest expanded exponentially. As testimony to that range, an archaeological site in the Rift Valley dated twenty-three thousand years ago gives evidence of a diet spanning four food webs (water, woodland, grassland, and arid) encompassing at least 20 large and small animals, 16 families of birds, and 140 kinds of fruit, nuts, seeds, and pulses, not to mention plants for medicinal and craft purposes—baskets, weaving, traps, weirs.

Cooking not only dramatically widened the range of nutritional sources and freed up calories for digesting instead of slow chewing and fermentation, the resulting soft foods allowed infants to be weaned more easily, and the old and toothless to eat.

In addition, a half-million years of cooking led to big brains:

The gains in nutritional efficiency, Richard Wrangham [of Harvard University] claims, largely account for the fact that our brains are three times the size one would expect, judging by other mammals. In the archaeological record the surge in brain size coincides with hearths and the remains of meals. Morphological changes of this magnitude have been known to occur in other animals in as little as twenty thousand years following a dramatic shift in diet and ecological niche.

Fire’s Mastery of Man

This leads to a starting insight. We have not only domesticated fire. It has domesticated us. We are so adapted to fire that we can’t live without it. The implications are huge. Scott on this concept; I’ve seen this nowhere else:

If the litmus test of domestication for a plant or animal is that it cannot propagate itself without our assistance, then, by the same token, we have adapted so massively to fire that our species would have no future without it. ... One small but telling piece of evidence is that raw-foodists who insist on cooking nothing invariably lose weight. [emphasis mine]

Could we go back to life without cooking? Not with our small guts and calorie-consuming brains. The human brain is roughly 2% of our weight, yet consumes 20-30% of our calories. We’d have to grow dumber and constantly feed ourselves to live without fire.

Can We Unadapt to Our Tools?

That gives rise to a general thought about tools and dependency: We were loose in the world when young, raw and undomesticated by the tools we use now. In that sense we were more adaptable then than now; to survive required only ourselves. We didn’t need tools like fire, we didn’t need larger brains to struggle through life.

Now we depend on our tools for everything. We’re like children who could add, and then bought calculators and forgot. Once we’ve been changed by our tools, can we go back?

The day when we’ll need to is coming. We’ll always have fire, of course; that won’t be lost. But the “first world,” for just one example, is adapted to electrical power and depends on its use — another two-way domestication. If that disappeared in a day, a week, or a year, who would survive? The return to non-electrical life would be wrenching to all and fatal to more than a few.

Would life as we know it survive without today’s tools? I’m certain it won’t.

Next Up

Next in this series we’ll examine the “domus,” a created amalgam that concentrated humans, animals and plants in a modified landscape. Remaking our world in this way resulted in “consequences no one could have possibly foreseen.” What were they? Stay tuned for more.