Fire Use: The Technological Leap of Homo Erectus

Homo Erectus and Their Ability To Use Fire

In today’s world smartphones would be considered as the most impressive technology ever invented, but truth to be told, fire is the most astonishing technology the human race has ever discovered. Even before being able to create their own fire, the hominids understood that fire was something they can make use of and therefore when a natural fire occurred, they would bring burning embers from the site back to their home (Caird 123). But natural fire didn’t occur everyday and especially not everywhere so it was extremely valuable for them. Knowing that fire was an essential in their daily life gave them the motive to make their own controlled fire. Dating back to over a million years ago the Homo

Not only that cooked food and cleaned water kept people healthy and alive, it also helped them become stronger and smarter. According to the US Food and Drug Administration, 60% of all poultry sold to consumers have some type of diseases, and that is only talking about now. Even in today’s world, heat is mainly use to kill bacteria in foods and it was also like that back then, except for the fact that heat was the only way to kill the bacterias in food then. If people have food poisoning now they would have antibiotics and doctors to treat them but back then if they experienced the worst case of food poisoning, which is botulism, they will die in less than a week (“Sick!” 299-309). The cooked food also increased the size of hominid brain. Even though brains do not fossilize like bones, archaeologists were able to tell that the brain grew over time because it left some indications of the convolutions of the cortex inside the earliest habiline skull. The skull is known as KNM ER-1470, about 1.8 million years old, and shows specific signs of the human brain. Compare to the Homo Habilis’ brain, which is the ancestor of the Homo Erectus, Homo Erectus’ brain is fifty percent larger (Gorman 5). This brain growth corresponded with the time the Homo Erectus started to eat cooked food (e.g. see fig. 1). About 20% of the things people consume goes to the brain and because cooked food have so much more calories, the Homo Erectus’ brain was able to receive much more nutrients (Joyce 3). Another benefit of consuming cooked meat was that it gave them a lot more energy throughout the day. Cooking makes