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

Erectus were able to skillfully use and control fire, giving them an advantage in areas like expansion, protection, and health (Cohen 4).

People would often think of expansion in term of migrating out of a geographic place. But not only did being able to create fire helped the prehistoric people do that, it also increased their population and interaction. When humans began using fire, it corresponded with the time of Homo Erectus’s population spread (Caird 124). The many fire caused by early humans contributed to plants growth and open pastures, which led to the growth in wildlife (Smith 6). As the population of wildlife increased, so did the population of humans who were carnivores. A group of people named Australopithecus Robustus, who were herbivores, became extinct over

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time. While the Homo Erectus, who were carnivores because being able to make their own fire allowed them to be, increased in population (Caird 124). Due to the fact that not everyone had the tools to produce fire back then, people expanded their social circle and formed the idea of trading. One of the first things that was traded between tribes was flint, because it was extremely valuable due to its ability to produce fire (Mongillo 3). Even in today’s world the Arctic is one of the least populated areas due to its harsh environment (Alenius 1). But the warmth fire produces gave them a chance to inhabit the freezing Arctic. That’s because no human can survive once their body’s temperature drops below 70 degrees fahrenheit over a period of time (Wolchover 14). Not only did the early people depended on fire for growth and survival, they also depended on it for security.

Even though it is hard to believe, but humans were once the preys and were powerless against the dominant carnivores. However, the role started to change after humans began to have their own fire (Caird 124). Most people know that many animals, especially cats, can see things much better in the dark than humans can, precisely six times better. Which means that not only animals like tigers, jaguars, and lions have the advantage of being much stronger than humans, they also have a much better vision in the dark (Baldwin 5). So fire became human biggest advantage because it allowed them to see clearer and better than when they depended on what little light they received from the moon. Not only that but they were able to use fire and control the animals by burning fields of dry grass to encircle animal herds and move in on those who weren’t able to escape the ring of fire (Mongillo 4). “Just as stone tools gave humans a new means of signalling, so too did fire, adding to their capacity to predict and control their world”

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(Johanson 24). But having the tools to protect themselves is useless if they don’t have the strength to use it.

Everybody know that food and water must be sterilized before consuming otherwise it can leads to serious complications in the body and even death.

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

eating

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much faster, easier, and it provides a lot more calories. Humans need at least nine hours of eating to get enough calorie per day from raw foods. So it takes much more work for the muscles and organs to chew and digest, which is why the body receives fewer calorie from raw foods and fewer calorie means less energy. But humans also need sterilized water just as they need cooked foods, if not even more so. An average person can go a little more than three weeks without food, but no more than three days without water. Early people didn’t have water purifier to clean their water for them, the only way to kill the hundreds of bacteria found in water was to heat it up. Otherwise the chances of them getting waterborne diseases was 100%. In this world, people takes cooked food and clean water for granted, but back then those things were sacred and fire helped them acquire it.

How the Homo Erectus used fire to expand, protect and cook during the Paleolithic Age all help to contribute to this modern day world people are now living in. The start of using fire was also the start of early humans migrating out of Africa, interacting with each other, and increasing their population dramatically. Even now with all the technology, people still have to take great precaution on open African plains, so having fire to protect themselves against the wildlife about one million year ago was life changing (Caird 123). As for being able to use fire to cook food, it connects people today to the past humans because cooking is the main way to sterilize food and water in every society. That being said, fire has helped the Homo Erectus and every other human species after them to survive and is still helping modern humans in their everyday lives today. It is needed to clean water, cook food, make transportations, and even helped in manufacturing smartphones.