Utilizing fire that was started by nature is one thing. But figuring out how to make a fire is a huge leap. Most of us would be challenged to make a fire without matches or lighter
@@BirdmanandPrincess You don't even know what a millennial is, sir. The Latest generation is Gen z, millennial are the people like me who were born in the early 80's, late 70's.
There's a book entitled "Catching Fire, How Cooking Made us Human" by Richard Wrangham. It expands on this video by describing how our bodies changed as our diets changed through the use of fire, and how the changes that preparing food with fire changed our interpersonal and societal relationships.
"Damn it Ugor, you burned the meat again, now we have to hunt again tomorow." 2 Million jears later: "Look Billy, this burned bones are the only evidence that humans lived here long ago."
"But of course the other advantage of fire is that it keeps you warm" And provides light in the darkness, which frightens away nocturnal predators. It also fires clay pots, hardens wooden spear points, clears land, smelts metals, and so on, and so on.
No wonder campfires smell so nice to us. We've been making them since before we were humans. Edit 12/19/20: Guys, no. I'm not talking about standing in the smoke or shoving your face in the embers. I'm talking about being out walking on a cold night and smelling someone's wood-burning fireplace off in the distance. It just makes me feel comforted.
There is at the very least the generally calming feeling of staring into a campfire after eating. Think about how far that feeling goes. The relief that we ate again, we are warm, we survived again today
Everyday DormRoomCliché So true, taming fore started the next chapter in human history. I feel every time we look into the fire, something in our chimp brain perks up in comfort and awe has those emotions are built into our dna, those feeling are in the blood of every homo sapien who lived and will ever live
Yes, early fire use would have been scattered and tentative leaving little evidence. It was probably occurring much earlier than we have a fossil record of.
Seriously.... what did these weirdos do??... burn the evidence??... I don’t care if I’m politically correct or not, there’s a lot of evidence supports my theory that cavemen were actually a bunch of idiots...
It's sort of amazing that one of the most important innovations in our development as a species is something that I'm sure 99.9 percent of us couldn't achieve today without modern tools.
@Sparky Puddins id say the best method to make a fire is with the bow method. All you need is a piece of string wrapped around two edges of a bendy stick. Then wrap the string around another stick. Then use the bow to move the stick back and forth.
I've accidentally caught my mat on fire while flint napping. Can't help but to think that's how it all started. With making fire. It's one of those answers that will be forever lost in time.
Yep...most great discoveries are accidental. Someone probably had been working wood earlier and had a pile of dry wood shavings, and then were making stone or flint tools, made a spark and the shavings caught on fire. And the rest is history!
Yo I had to google that ish! XD I thought it was like sleeping and I was so intrigued... Then I realised that you mis spelled knapping and I felt like a lazy twat 😁😁
Could you do a video on when human beings first arrived in Australia and the species they encountered/affected, We had some amazing wildlife here people just don’t know about! Edit: Thanks everyone who's hopped over to have a look at some of the animals in our videos!
I dont know the full story but I think they came from south east Asia. Such as Indonesia Malaysia etc. At one point in time sea levels dropped and they island hop their way to the new continent. Although I'm not fully sure is this is correct so don't take my word for it. 🤔😶
Dreadnought yes they must have come through Indonesia but the fact they where here so long and isolated for so long suggests they where an earlier wave of human expansion then ones that went elsewhere
Man stuff like this makes me wish I were omnipotent so I could travel back in time, make myself invisible and just fly around observing early humans. It'd be the ultimate people watching, and it'd be so amazing to see them with the knowledge of what's to come. I could find the very first person to learn how to create fire, it'd be like visiting a great (times however many) grandparent or something. Like "wow so it was you huh? you got things going for us without even the slightest clue of what this moment will lead to" it'd be incredible.
I love the movie, "Quest For Fire" & one of my favorite parts is when our "hero" sees a member of the other tribe start a fire from scratch. The awe on that Actor's face deserved an Oscar, IMO! To learn this skill would mean no more "questing" to find fire (not to mention trying to keep it burning), would make all the difference in their world.
@@m_i_g_5108 Well, yes, all you had to do was listen to Macbreak Weekly's latest episode just before the keynote to hear a summary of the most credible rumors, which all pretty much turned out to be true. "Quest for Fire" also had people in the know about how to start a fire.
I think this was probably the most well-written Eons episode yet. It was almost cinematic while staying completely truthful to the tale and knowledge it was attempting to convey
My only skepticism is that the ‘harnessing of fire’ is not the same as ‘starting fire’. As is the case with many modern nomadic tribes, they generally don’t favor starting a fire every time they move, they keep smoldering embers that travel with them. It seems much more likely that fire-wielding hominids were keeping fires going for millennia before they were actually creating fire. The process of fire creation is quite involved. Keeping smoldering embers hot for a day and then stoking a fire every night is a far more passive action than spending 30+ minutes starting a fire from scratch. Another thing fire brought that I don’t if I missed in the video or not was the safety fire brought. Most predators will steer clear of fire, meaning fire-wielding hominids could focus more on sleeping well and less on being alert at night. Allowing for greater brain development in that sense too.
ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-BFhXfmjwrUk.html is a relevant video on the transport of fires, and how common that is compared to starting new ones.
I find it hard to believe that hominids evolved around keeping a naturally occurring fire, that they stumbled upon, going for thousands of years. Imagine those embers get wet.. I suppose that they are just screwed until they find another fire? Those who consistently used, depended upon and evolved around fire, most likely knew how to make it.
It’s not so much that a single fire was kept going for millennia, it’s that these earlier hominids probably knew how to keep fire going before they learned how to make fire. The process of just keeping a fire going is advantageous, yet not as complicated as starting fire. Meaning these ancestors were probably wielding naturally occurring fires, keeping them going for weeks or months and then finding new fire to replenish in the case an old fire is extinguished. Of course this is a simplification of the process. You have to imagine that there are multiple generations between each step, until ultimately starting a fire becomes a norm. Fire is much like all tool use. It starts with simple, archaic designs and slowly is sophisticated through trial and error and learning how to use those tools.
Another aspect missing from the video is that much more plausible items to cook like potatoes are also extremely unlikely to be fossilized. Therefor we should take "evidence" like burnt bone with a huge grain of salt. We use to think Neanderthals must have been big angry and dumb based on completely silly assumptions. One of the possible evolutionary advantages of humans was being able to chew lots of different types of foods like seeds or bark, etc which would easily explain Neanderthals "devoted real estate" to their jaws and which would have no longer been of any advantage after fire. Further their extinction can be easily explained by cross breeding which also explains the so far otherwise unexplained rapid genealogical changes of homo sapiens. But no the most obvious explanation is clearly that were big aggressive dumb dumbs that smashed their heads with rocks and homo sapiens became protohunters and wiped them out through sophisticated deathtraps. Meanwhile homo sapiens were cutting up meat with extremely sharp rock tools and not getting sick thanks to their exceptional microbial tolerance that of course we lost again after agriculture. That sounds WAYYY more plausible right? And hey if we're gonna believe in fanciful stories over being honest about what the evidence actually proves then I choose to believe homo sapiens were providers for Neanderthals. Neanderthals would have had the advantage of being able to chew just about anything for food while homo sapiens would have been able to prepare food including the ability to have better discretion over which foods were poisonous for example. It makes sense than that homo sapiens would have had a better time with migration which helps their species stay alive through climate changes. In the meantime though the cohabitation of Neanderthals leads to cross breeding. Note that in this way cross breeds with mostly Neanderthal traits would have had a much higher morality. Having a lot of muscle puts you at a huge disadvantage for surviving winters for example when calories are extremely limited. But its a lot easier for a species to "go extinct" when its not actually dying out but rather is susceptible to selection pressures in what is technically a new species. In that sense we can say about 20% or so of Neanderthals did survive except that its in each of us rather than separate less adaptable individuals.
MrStensnask yeah I got excited when I started a friction fire with a stick and a piece of wood. To think that’s been around for over 1 million years... imagine how lost we would be back in the day
Many years ago I attended a lecture on early humans and Fire by Louis Leakey. He told of an experiment in which a group of archeologists spent one night outside stark naked with no fire, and another night with fire, and the amazing difference it made to the group.
You should make a video about how modern cats and dogs came to be from their wild ancestors or maybe just a general video on how domestication can effect evolution.
The First Flame quickly fades. Darkness will shortly settle. But one day, tiny flames will dance across the darkness. Like embers, linked by lords past."
It's not quite old enough for eons, but something about our relationship with cats and how that started would be cool. I'm willing to bet it's older than most people think.
Incredible. Also very interesting is how fire could be carried from site to site perhaps even before it could be made allowing us to move north that much earlier. Here in New Mexico Native Americans used plants with massive roots such as bush morning glory, Ipomea sp and desert 4 o'clock Mirabilis sp in containers to keep a living fire with them wherever they go. That would have been a hell of a responsibility. Anyhow that's how I like to imagine we mozied on north so early. Thanks Hank!
Finally, the type of video I was looking for, the type that all others avoided talking about...the history, creation and control of fire by mankind. I'm currently learning firestarting, using only sticks!!!
This video is made of the same stuff that made me love pbs nature documentaries and other pbs shows while growing up as a kid in the 90's. Thank you so much!
the more I watch Eons' videos, the more I'm convinced that Homo Erectus were the original heroes of our evolutionary story, the veterans who had completed their main heroic story arc before the arrival of Homo Sapiens. they were the Luke to our Rey we're the second primates to conquer the world you guys
It's not that simple to start a fire without matches or a lighter. I wouldn't be surprised if it were a more exclusive skill for a long while before it became something every member of the general population could do. Which means there could very well have been vast differences between tribes of the same species based on wheter they had a "firestarter" or not.
Yes fire is tough to start the old-fashioned way but have you ever tried making the simplest stone tools from stones? It is very humbling when a modern Homo sapiens cant do what the typical 2 to 3 million year old Homo or Australopithecine could do.
@@dilaudid1 That's what I remark everytime they say ''ancients were dumb monkeys''. Just try flintknapping to being able to cut some animal, and oh man...you'd better buy it on the market or get starving. And YES, they had the same problem to solve! Being hungry developes creativity, we have everything solved by now and don't realize how easy we live.
@@VeronicaGorositoMusic That is a great point, Gitana. Even throwing any of us back 200 years would be nearly impossible for us to function. Now surviving in the stone age is at least an order of magnitude more difficult!
Awesome. Thank you so very much Hank and friends. It is quite funny how early humans and other extinct hominids are always depicted with terrible hair and skin. As if people who don't have mirrors or tooth paste would not care about their appearance. As far as I can tell, small primates, cats, birds even seem to like a good groom and appear to care a lot about their appearance. Certainly, isolated tribes in the modern day spend a great deal of effort making themselves look the way they like. Why would early hominids have been any different?
Because they had different notions of beauty and attractiveness which were based on the abilities they had. If you don't have any makeup, you don't expect people to wear any makeup. If you don't have any scissors, you don't expect people to have nicely cut hair. I think that a lot of the illustrations of these people take those things into consideration. I also think that your observation is very important and should color our perceptions of the observations made in videos like this.
@@chriswarburtonbrown1566 True. I was thinking more about glam shiny makeup and dreads, though. And while we're at it, tattoos seem to be makeup that was intermittent in its social acceptance. All I meant was applying our (Western) modern ideas of "beauty" aren't the way every human culture for the past 50k years or so, regardless of location, saw it.
The history of Fire! For a very long time our ancestors loved fire but couldn't create it. They likely tossed foods in a wildfire noting that it was a tasty treat and made some things more edible. Then someone came up with the idea of taking fire from the wildfires and cooking with it back at the homestead. A few burning branches near home made a fun, safe, and tasty food prep item. As time went on there were probably a lot of our ancestors that kept fires burning as long as they could, maybe even for years, but at some point they always went out. As the stone-age intensified and stone tools were being made regularly, there were likely places around the world where stone workers noticed that their sparks could start fires if around dried plants or fur. It was a happy circumstance, a gift from the spirits of nature, but it was fleeting. After many more centuries, they figured out how to create the circumstances of starting a fire themselves and began doing so regularly. The knowledge of fire starting was probably discovered, lost, and found again many times over the centuries. Still, some of those groups started keeping a tradition of knowing how to start fires, and over time nearly every group had this fire-starting knowledge. It was at this point in time, when cooked food could be a regular occurrence, that fire began to change the course of human evolution and human history forever! And over the millennia, no matter how many disasters were caused by fire, or how many people were killed by their precious fire, humans always rekindled the flame.
This was totally fascinating. Movement of humans around the globes is still my #1 Eons vid, but this one is definitely top 5. So much info in so little time!
Us corporations take tribal cultavated plants and patent them, without permission or payment. Next step is to sue the originators for using their patented plants.
Hey, there's no doubt that mind altering substances had a profound affect on the evolution of our consciousness, and anyone who's taken a psychedelic wouldn't doubt that
@@post-leftluddite I honestly wouldn't be surprised our prehistoric ancestors experienced mind altering substances. The chances of coming across some psychedelic mushrooms in the forest seem just as likely (if not more so) than intentionally walking up to a dangerous forest fire to harness it.
That's not a bad thing, for instance, did you know that domesticated animals on average have approximately 25% smaller brains than their wild predecessors?
There are so many excellent myths and stories about this pivotal moment. Ancient (like Prometheus), modern (like Starkid's Firebringer). I love how culture can combine the hopeful and the terrifying: hopeful, in that fire allows us the use of the night; terrifying, in that we put ourselves in the way of danger by bringing fire into our homes, and the long road from hunting and gathering to climate change is traveled in the name of progress by the many things we burn. What a symbol. Contemplating it is so cool.
@@TheBelrick What? If you mean nothing was domesticated in Africa, well there are cats, asses, and Guinea fowl. If you mean nothing was domesticated outside of Africa, there are horses, camels, and llamas.
When you sit around a campfire and talk, and maybe make something with your hands, even just whittling, you can feel the deep human history in your bones. It works for everyone and is a special magical feeling that ties all humans together regardless of race.
Yeah I did exactly that last weekend and it was amazing how deep ( and hilarious) the conversation got very quickly. We ended up in a circle round the fire dancing the Time Warp. There's just something magical about fire for the human spirit.
Hey Eons team!!! Would love to see a video on the evolution of language. Books on this subject I would recommend are Robin Dunbar's Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language and also Susan Blackmore's radically different The Meme Machine. Love the videos as always, will be sure to pick up a tee!!
There are videos comparing multiple languages to find the first language on Earth. They believe languages with similar grammar and sounds have common cultural origins. So they divide things in language families. Their is Sino-Tibetan language family, Indo-European language family, Pueblo language family, Semitic language family (Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic).
...thank you for a person of reason. I don't think the WILDFIRES that burned parts of California TO ASHES for the past few years was aware "WE TAMED IT "....
Perhaps the lack of fire in the colder zones reflects the lack of wood for fuel. The zones near the glaciated areas was usually not forested, but was grasslands/steppes, right? If they were making fires, it may have been material that left less evidence, due to smaller fires of shorter duration, such as those made by burning dung are today.
I love to think that the first hominids that cooked food did so because they were walking near a forest fire where a cow was burning and went "hey, that smells good!"
“God dang it Foru, you burned down the house AND the pigs. Were going to have to have salad tonight.” “No Dungo, look at this!!!! We can eat the pigs even though they are slightly burned!!” And thats how they learned about cooked food.
One thing I missed here -- fire frees the skull from its duty as an anchor for heavy jaw muscles, allowing the brain case to balloon up to its cartoonish modern size.
Hundreds of thousands of years ago, my ancestors: gets cold and hungry and makes a bonfire with sticks. Hundreds of thousands of years later, me: gets cold and wishes I can start a bonfire in my room without adding to my gas utilities, setting off the smoke alarm, or lighting the house on fire.
What would happen if a different animal evolve to be intelligent as us. It’s possible to happen even now, its just that humans are keeping them beck from becoming more intelligent.
just a printed pocket is kinda... meh. maybe do something with a full shirt print of a scene with dinosaurs, or fossils, or a picture or space/galaxies/nebulas, those would look awesome and probably sell very well:)
@thanks Sure, I know that. But having more than one revenue stream is very common for most successful channels, and in the current climate, basically a requirement. I would have just expected more people to want to support Eons as patrons. I guess I shouldn't be too surprised, I'm subbed to NASA's official channel and they get like 50 upvotes per video despite being literally NASA lol 🙄
When he was talking about how cooking can be considered part of the digestive process, I imagined a fly explaining to other flies, "when you vomit on your food it actually starts breaking down the food and starts the digestive process. When I put it like that it sounds disgusting, but it's actually delicious."
One of the most important uses of fire that I think was missed out from this video was protection against wild animals. Humans were able to protect themselves and their entire family/ colony from predators by having fires around their campsites.
Animal instinct is to run from fire. With this invention humanity conquered nature’s most potent weapon against any species: Predation. The moment we “invented” fire was the moment humanity transcended nature and became something greater.