Surely flame is what I am
What is fire? What does it do?
Fire on the earth is not just a dramatic accident or conflagration. Fire, as it naturally occurs, is embedded into the very cycle of the ecology of life all over the planet. Life on earth needs fire and it has developed around its regimens wherever fire is found. What photosynthesis stitches together fire quickly undoes and puts it back into the earth and the atmosphere. In this way fire is an integral part of the cycling of energy and material through the ecological web. All living things breathe. And it is that breath which cycles oxygen and carbon dioxide. It might be said that landscapes “fire”, which might be their larger version of breath which cycles the very same ingredients. Taking fire away from environments where it is naturally found can be just as smothering as imposed shade or sudden flooding.
Fire needed time to emerge on the earth. Life in the early oceans pumped the atmosphere full of oxygen. When plants started to emerge onto the land they sucked up all that free-floating oxygen. Eventually oxygen levels rose to perhaps as high as 35%, which allowed for life forms, plants and animals, to become huge. While life on earth supplied the materials for fire it required something nonbiological to create ignition - lightning. This made fire the unique creature on earth. Fire was probably the first-most concentrated feeder on the planet. While all sorts of natural phenomena like earthquakes and volcanoes and storms can happen on the earth without any sign of life, fire needs living things to exist, to feed upon. While we may have taken fire far from this context this is where it began.
As life and fire grew together they established a relationship. In its natural state, fire belongs to a particular place and time and season. The patterns of burning that emerged on fields and plains and in forests around the world allowed for particular types of life to grow in between the spaces and times of the fire. The relationship between fire and landscape is an old one. For more than 400 million years fire cultivated a relationship with different lands and fire followed cycles of rain and the sun. The sun dried it all out and the fire could come in set the next step into motion. Some places rarely had fire, like rainforests and jungles. In places like that insects, other animals, and fungus did the cycling. Only rarely would fire come in or could come in. But in other places fires were an active participant in the ecology and were usually sparked by lightning when the conditions were appropriate. Then the nascent fires would grow, feed, spread, and eventually starve and die when they ran out of either food or fuel or air.
When humans started to be able to control fire and started to introduce fire where it hadn’t lived before, it had the same effect as introducing non-native species that we see today. The plant or the animal becomes invasive and overruns the environment that wasn’t prepared for it or the way it operated. And so it has been with fire.
“Surely, flame is what I am” - Friedrich Nietzsche
Early man in southern and eastern Africa was constantly around fire. They, like all the plants and animals, had to contend and cope with the cyclical fire regime to survive. Early man did not discover fire, but seized it and learned to use it and eventually to make it himself. While early man made stone tools that functionally extended the power of the hand, fire was a completely different beast. Fire became a tool that functionally transformed that which it was applied to. They could keep a stone knife and carry it around but fire was different. It had no form and it needed to be contained to be carried and it had to always be fed.
We can tell from the fossil record that Homo erectus (1.9 million years to 100,000 years ago) could certainly maintain fire and we see some evidence of that emerging around 1.5 million years ago. But it was not until the emergence of Homo Heidelbergensis (600,000 years ago) and early Homo sapien (200,000 years ago) does it seem likely that fire could be made and produced relatively easily and frequently. But whether maintained or made, this alive tool and technology that was fire needed to be relentlessly fed. And if fire was going to be kept over time one person could not feed the fire for long, only a group could. Collecting grass, twigs, sticks, branches, and larger pieces of wood required coordination and cooperation. Making fire was fundamental to making social relationships in early man. “Kin” and “kindling” are related - it is a family affair to start and keep a fire. The early humans practiced what might be called “pyroculture” and laid down the core skills humans would later turn into horticulture and agriculture millennia later; taking a wild and natural feature, protecting it from the elements, feeding and controlling it for human use is a process that certainly started with fire and then reapplied in a different sphere with plants and animals like cows, sheep, horses, and dogs.
This constant need to feed fires allows for a reasonable case that the migration of humans out of Africa was in part driven by a hunger for fuel for the insatiable and necessary fire. They were chasing new sources of fallen wood. And as we chased the wood and made the fires, slowly, over time we learned and we changed. Cooking food led to experiments in cooking stone and sand and eventually metal. We noticed how fire changed each of them in different ways and cooking became foundational with how we interacted with the world.