When fire appeared on the earth. Fire and primitive people
The development of fire by ancient people became a turning point in human social evolution, allowing people to diversify protein and carbohydrate foods with the opportunity to cook it, develop their activity at night, and also protect themselves from predators.
Evidence
1.42 mya: East Africa
The first evidence of the use of fire by people refers to such archaeological sites of ancient man East Africa like Chesovanya near Lake Baringo, Koobi Fora and Ologesalirie in Kenya. The evidence at Czesovanyi is about 1.42 million years old red clay shards. Traces of firing these fragments indicate that they were heated to a temperature of 400 ° C - to give hardness.
At Koobi Fora, at sites FxJjzoE and FxJj50, evidence has been found of the use of fire by Homo erectus dating back approximately 1.5 million years, with red deposits that can only form at temperatures of 200-400°C. Kiln-pit-like formations found in Olorgesailie, Kenya. Some fine charcoal was also found, although it may have come from natural fire as well.
Fragments of ignimbrite were found in the Ethiopian Gabeb at location No. 8, which appears as a result of combustion, but overheating of the rock could also have appeared as a result of local volcanic activity. They were among the artifacts of the Acheulian culture created by H. erectus.
In the middle of the valley of the Awash River, conical formations with red clay were found, which is possible only at a temperature of 200°C. These finds suggest that the wood may have been burned to keep the fire away from its habitat. In addition, burnt stones were found in the Awash valley, but volcanic rocks were also present in the area of the ancient site.
790-690 thousand years ago: Near East
In 2004, the Bnot Ya "akov Bridge site was discovered in Israel, which proves the use of fire by H. erectus or H. ergaster (working man) about 790-690 thousand years ago. In the Kesem cave, 12 kilometers east of Tel Aviv, evidence was found regular use of fire approximately 382-200 thousand years ago, at the end of the early Pleistocene.A significant amount of burnt bones and moderately heated earthen masses suggests that livestock was slaughtered and butchered near the fire.
700-200 thousand years ago: South Africa
The first indisputable evidence of human use of fire was found in the South African Swartkrans. Several burnt stones have been found among Acheulean tools, stone tools, and man-marked stones. The area also shows early evidence of H. erectus carnivory. The Cave of Hearths in South Africa contains burnt rocks 0.2 - 0.7 million years old, as well as in other areas - Montagu Cave (0.058 - 0.2 million years) and Clesis River Mouse (0.12 - 0.13 million years).
The strongest evidence found in the Kalambo Falls area in Zambia - during excavations, several artifacts were found indicating the use of fire by people: scattered firewood, charcoal, red clay, carbonized stems of grass and plants, as well as wooden accessories, possibly fired. The age of the location, determined using radiocarbon analysis, is approximately 61,000 years, and according to amino acid analysis, 110,000 years.
Fire was used to heat the silcrete stones to facilitate their subsequent processing and the manufacture of tools of the Stillbay culture. The conducted studies compare this fact not only with the Stillbay site, which is about 72 thousand years old, but also with sites that can be up to 164 thousand years old.
200 thousand years ago: Europe
Numerous European sites also show evidence of H. erectus using fire. The oldest one was discovered in the village of Verteshsolos, Hungary, where evidence was found in the form of charred bones, but without charcoal. Charcoal and timber are present in Torralba and Ambrona, Spain, and Acheulean stoneware is 0.3 - 0.5 million years old.
In Saint-Esteve-Janson, in France, there is evidence of fires and reddened earth in the Escalais cave. These bonfires are about 200 thousand years old.
Far East
In Xihoudu, Shanxi province, black, gray and grey-green mammal bones are evidence of a burning. In China's Yuanmou, Yunnan Province, another ancient site with blackened mammalian bones has been discovered.
At Trinil, on the island of Java, similar blackened animal bones and deposits of charcoal have also been found among the fossils of H. erectus.
China
In Chinese Zhoukoudian, evidence of the use of fire is between 500,000 and 1.5 million years old. The use of fire at Zhoukoudian is inferred from the discovery of burnt bones, burnt stone artifacts, charcoal, ash, and fire pits around the H. erectus fossils in Layer 10 Location 1. The remains of the bones were characterized as burnt rather than manganese-stained. These remains also showed the presence of the infrared spectrum characteristic of oxides, and the bones with a turquoise hue were later reproduced in the laboratory by burning other bones found in Layer 10. At the site, a similar effect could also be the result of exposure to natural fire, as well as the effect on white, yellow and black bones. Layer 10 is an ash containing biosilicon, aluminium, iron and potassium, but wood ash residues such as silicon compounds are absent. Against this background, it is possible that the fireplaces "were formed as a result of the complete decay of silt and clay interlayers with red-brown and yellow fragments of organic matter, in places mixed with fragments of limestone and dark brown completely decomposed silt, clay and organic matter." This ancient site does not in itself prove the making of fire at Zhoukoudian, but the comparison of blackened bones with stone artefacts in recent times says that while living in the cave of Zhoukoudian, people used fire.
Behavioral changes and evolution
Fire and the light emanating from it made the most important changes in the behavior of people. Activity is no longer limited daytime. In addition, many large animals and biting insects avoided fire and smoke. The fire also led to improved nutrition due to the ability to cook protein foods.
Richard Wrongham of Harvard University argues that plant-based cooking may have been responsible for the accelerated development of the brain during evolution, as the polysaccharides in starchy foods became more digestible and, as a result, allowed the body to absorb more calories.
Diet changes
Stahl believed that since substances such as cellulose and starch, which are found in the greatest quantities in stems, roots, leaves and tubers, are difficult to digest, these plant organs could not have been a major part of the human diet before the use of fire.
A good one and a half million years ago, man tamed fire. It was perhaps the most outstanding event in the history of mankind: the fire provided light and warmth, drove away wild animals and made meat tastier. He was a great magician: he led from savagery to civilization, from nature to culture.
The history of human development is the history of people's survival in the world around them. One can argue for a long time about what is the root cause or driving force development of human civilization, but there is no doubt that it is closely related to the desire of a person to comfortably adapt to the environment. Caution, a sense of danger, the desire to avoid death are inherent not only to man, but also to other inhabitants of the planet Earth. Animals also have some initial information about the properties of the surrounding bodies. The fact that stones are sharp, fire is hot, water is liquid, etc., animals, just like children, “learn” from experience. But the ability to use, for example, a sharp stone to work another stone or stick, i.e., to expediently combine certain properties of tools and raw materials in the process of labor, is an exclusively human quality. Such qualities have developed in people and are manifested by them consciously, and are also embedded in their subconscious in the form of instincts. Man on Earth gained superiority over animals due to the fact that he was able to quickly adapt to the environment, to changes in nature and use natural forces to his advantage.
We are interested not only in the history of the development of man as a biological species, but in how man mastered the natural world and created a completely new world- the world of energy technology.
We do not know exactly when it happened, perhaps the greatest event on the million-year path of the transformation of our ancient ancestor into modern man is that people mastered fire and learned how to make it. Reverently primitive man bowed his knees before nature (Fig. 2.1). But having subjugated fire, one of the most formidable elemental forces, making it an obedient instrument of his life at a very early stage of development, a person felt himself not a slave of nature, but her equal partner.
The first fire that primitive man used for his needs was heavenly fire. This is indicated by the legends and myths of almost all peoples of the world, their characters are Hephaestus of the Greeks, Prometheus, the phoenix of the ancient Romans, the Vedic god Agni of the Hindus, the firebird of the North American Indians. In all these creations of folk fantasy, the view of fire as an element of heavenly origin is vividly reflected. Lightning caused fire on earth, although it is possible that in some places man became familiar with fire and its use in volcanic eruptions.
In the life of primitive man, fire played an important role - it was his best assistant. The fire warmed him and protected him from the winter cold, the fire made his food edible and tastier, the fire shone on him in the dark evening and morning hours, especially in the long winter months, he burned his pottery and utensils with fire, a person resorted to it to make metal tools and weapons, with the fire of bonfires, he drove wild animals away from his home at night.
The mastery of fire made man immeasurably stronger. People worshiped fire as a deity (Fig. 2.2), they kept it for centuries, because at first a person did not know how to make fire, he lit it from another fire - during forest fires or volcanic eruptions. It can be assumed that the most stable sources of fire were volcanoes, or rather, entire volcanic zones. Intense volcanic activity on Earth within the framework of the Anthropogen coincides with the early stages of the ancient Paleolithic. In terms of power and number of foci, it was almost ten times greater than the volcanic activity of our era.
Other but less important sources of fire in nature were forest fires (Figure 2.3) and steppe fires, spontaneous combustion due to the activity of microorganisms, ignition of trees from a lightning strike, and the eternal flame of natural gas wells, which is the most stable source of fire in areas rich in oil deposits. .
And yet the surest source of fire in the period when they already knew how to use it, but still did not know how to get it, was its transmission from person to person.
Fire played a social role in bringing wild human groups together (Figure 2.4). The need for fire pushed one group to search for another, led to mutual assistance and unity. ancient primitive people often arranged their camps near a ravine or a high bank of a river (Fig. 2.5). Changing the parking lot, primitive people carried with them burning brands or smoldering coals. The transfer of fire later became a custom observed for a long time by the descendants of primitive people. It was observed by travelers of the 18th and 19th centuries in Australia, America, Africa, and Polynesia.
It is impossible to say how long ago a man first dipped a wick into a bowl filled with animal fat, turning it into a lamp, but primitive lamps carved from chalk or sandstone date back to about 80,000 BC. Some 10,000 year old ceramic lamps have been found in Iraq.
The Bible testifies that candles made from the same animal fat burned in Solomon's temple as early as the 10th century BC. Since then, not a single divine service could do without them, but they were widely used in everyday life only in the Middle Ages.
The minimum standard of living at which the work of the heart, lungs, and a minimum of digestion is maintained requires a certain amount of energy. In cold weather, it takes a little more energy to heat the body. Walking and other moderate activities place additional demands, and strenuous exercise requires even more energy. During heavy physical work, we must consume much more food than is necessary for the work itself, because the efficiency of our body is only about 25%, and the remaining 75% is spent on heat.
To maintain a minimum standard of living for a healthy person, about 2 kilocalories per day are needed; swimming or football requires an additional 0.5 kilocalories per hour, and eight hours of hard physical work requires an additional 2 kilocalories per day.
Mental labor requires very little immediate energy expenditure—the mind is skillful, but apparently not greedy.
The same custom was observed by early travellers, wandering through America after its discovery. North American Indians maintained unquenchable fires at the entrance to their huts, and carried smoldering tinder with them when crossing. No matter how far the time when primitive people lived, but in the legends of ancient cultured peoples, in some customs and rituals, vague memories of maintaining unquenchable fires have been preserved. While excavating in the Zhou-Kou-dian cave near Beijing, archaeologists discovered traces of a fire that burned continuously in the same place for five hundred thousand years, and, for example, in ancient rome female priestesses maintained an unquenchable fire on the altar of the goddess Vesta, although the true meaning of this custom was long forgotten. And in modern Christian churches, “inextinguishable” lamps are burning, and the believers who keep the fire in them do not suspect that they are repeating the custom of our distant ancestors that has lost its meaning, to whom the fire seemed to be something mysterious and incomprehensible.
The period of natural fire, obtained from nature and maintained in hearths, was probably very long.
Since the sky did not always put its fire at the disposal of man, then, naturally, he decided to call it himself. And here is a new great discovery, the first step towards mastering the forces of nature - man himself has learned to obtain this beneficent gift for himself in various ways. And here, again, the mentor was nature.
It is possible that the impetus for the invention of the first fire, which is still sometimes found among peoples who are at the lowest level of culture, was given by the observation that some stones strike sparks when they hit certain objects. To make fire by striking a spark, primitive people had special devices. This is confirmed by the finds of devices of a peculiar shape, made of thick prismatic stones, found during excavations of dwellings and tombs next to pieces of weathered sulfur pyrites, which were nothing more than ancient fires. The impact stone for these fires was thick prismatic knives, the edges of which were deliberately made rough. In later fires, the fire was obtained in this way: a flint resting in one hand tears off the smallest particles from the flint sliding along it with a longitudinal edge (later the flint was replaced with a piece of steel), which, oxidizing when passing through the air, glow and ignite the substituted dry moss, tinder and etc.
This method was used mainly in countries with arid climates, where atmospheric humidity is minimal. A very small and short spark arising from the impact of flint on flint is very sensitive to the state of the atmosphere. True, there are indications of making fire in this way in tropical countries. For example, according to ethnographers, making fire by striking flint on flint exists among the hunting and agricultural groups of the Jagua, who still live in the upper reaches of the Amazon. The men make the fire, and the women carry the fuel and keep the fire burning in the hearth. The carving process is very difficult and requires, under favorable conditions, from half an hour to an hour. Ethnographers note that when the tree smolders, the flame is fanned out by a fan of tail feathers of a wild turkey. The Yagua people in every way avoid making fire in this way and use firebrands from the hearths of neighbors or from a public hearth, constantly maintained in the ancestral home with special care. In the mornings, women take firebrands from there for their hearths. Hunters take fire with them during their trips, lighting long-smoldering sticks 35 to 45 cm long and 1 cm in diameter.
The flint and flint in its "classic" incarnation appeared much later, when iron became known. Almost unchanged, it has existed for many centuries. Even in a modern gas lighter, the principle of a flint and flint is still used. Only electric lighters of the most recent years they break with a thousand-year tradition: the spark in them is not of a mechanical origin, but of an electrical one.
Friction was another way of making fire in ancient times. One of the primitive people, sitting on the ground, quickly rotated a dry stick between his palms, resting its end against a dry tree (Fig. 2.6). From pressure, a recess was drilled in the tree, in which wood powder accumulated. Finally, the powder caught fire, and from it it was already easy to set fire to dry grass and make a fire. If, due to an oversight, the fire was extinguished, then
it was mined again in the same way - by rubbing pieces of dry wood against each other.
When making fire by rubbing wood against wood, it is possible to use three methods: sawing, plowing (“fire plow”) and drilling. Making fire by means of sawing and plowing was known from ethnographic data relating to Australia, Oceania and Indonesia. The production of fire by these methods is known among many backward peoples, including the Negritos of Fr. Luson, using two halves of split bamboo, Australians, using two sticks or a shield and a spear thrower. The sawing method also includes making fire from the Kukukuku tribe and from the Mbowamba (New Guinea), who used a flexible torch taken from the top layer of bamboo.
When walking through the forest at night, the people of the Kuku-Kuku tribe took with them a torch made of bamboo up to 3 m long. The upper sections of the bamboo were filled with araucaria resin. The torch burned for several hours.
As for the method of the "fire plow" used by the Oceanians, here, probably, the production of fire is associated with a special type of wood. Botanists point to a tree-like plant from the madder family (Cuettarda uruguensis), capable of sparking in 2-3 minutes.
By rotating the rod between the palms, the Australians, Indians of South America and other peoples made fire, which is evidenced by the observations of ethnographers. And judging by these testimonies, making fire by rotating the rod between the palms was carried out by one, two and even three men. The palms during the rapid rotation of the rod became very hot, the hands got tired. Therefore, the first person who began to rotate the rod passed it to the second, and if there was a third, he took the rod from the second and passed it on to the first. Such a transfer of the rod from one person to another is also explained by the fact that during the rotation of the rod, the hands quickly slid from the upper end down due to the need to forcefully press the rod against the wood. It was impossible to move the arms from the bottom end up without stopping the rotation. The continuity of the rotation of the rod, necessary for heating the working end, was achieved by collective efforts.
Experienced craftsmen worked alone in dry weather. The whole process of making fire took no more than one minute, although during this time a person, if he worked alone, rotated the rod with maximum tension. The lower stick or plank was pressed down to the ground with the foot. Among the Xingu Indians, the flammable substance was often the fiber of the bark of a palm tree, dry grass or leaves, and the spongy tissue of plants.
Making fire by drilling was difficult for an inexperienced person. Therefore, the Indians most often carried long-smoldering firebrands with them. While fishing, they took rotten logs into the boats, capable of smoldering for one or two days. Wood flour was considered a good smoldering substance. To carry the fire with wood flour, a piece of reed with holes was used, which was waved from time to time. In places where hunting camps were usually located, dry wood and flammable substances were collected in advance and stored in secluded corners.
The method of obtaining fire by drilling with a bow is considered more perfect (Fig. 2.7, a, b). From the outside, the ignition process when drilling with a beam looks like this. At first, clouds of smoke appear. You can then watch how chocolate-colored wood powder begins to accumulate around the rapidly rotating drill. Separate particles of this powder, carried away by the rapid movement, are ejected further. You can clearly see how they fall, smoking, although the sparks are not visible.
The combustion center does not occur under the drill, where a high temperature develops, since there is no air there, and not around the drill, but near the side slot, where hot powder accumulates in a pile, where air freely enters and supports combustion (Fig. 2.7, c3e). The pile of powder continues to smoke even when the drilling stops. it sure sign burning. Under the black layer of powder, a hearth of red-hot flaming coals is preserved. The combustion center remains for 10–15 minutes. From it, you can safely ignite any flammable substance - thin birch bark, dry moss, tow, wood shavings, etc.
Thus, considering the use and production of fire, scientists believe that throughout the ancient and middle Paleolithic, fire was obtained from natural sources and was constantly maintained in the hearths. The transfer of fire from one group of hunter-gatherers to another at critical moments was the most important means of maintaining the inextinguishability of fire within the boundaries of an inhabited area, the nature of which was not rich in natural sources. The exchange of fire played a huge role in the social contacts of this ancient period. Artificial fire making probably appeared in the Late Paleolithic in three technical variants: by rubbing wood against wood, by striking sparks by hitting stone against stone, and by sawing wood against wood.
The ability to make fire for the first time gave man dominance over a certain force of nature. Fire, along with mechanical tools, served as a powerful means of developing the intellect, the emergence of prudent actions calculated for the near future. Fire laid the foundation for the human economy, placing a person in conditions of constant activity, activity and tension. It could not be put aside and forgotten at least for a while, as one could do with any object, including stone tools. The fire had to be maintained so that it would not go out. He had to be monitored so that he did not ignite other objects. With fire, a person had to always be on his guard: do not touch with his hands, protect from wind and rain, regulate the flame, store dry fuel and do much more. The result was to be a division of labor between women and men. A woman, connected with housing with the functions of childbearing, raising and raising children, turned out to be the main keeper of the fire, the founder of the household.
Fire became the basis of the dwelling, as well as a source of heat and light, a means for cooking, protection from predators. He served as a means of processing wooden tools by firing them to give hardness and facilitate work, a hunting tool. Fire gave man the opportunity to inhabit different latitudes of the globe. It is not for nothing that all peoples at some stage of their development went through a period of fire worship, in almost every religion one of the most powerful gods was the god of fire.
As we can see, the importance of fire was great not only for the cultural progress of mankind; he played a big role in the very process of the formation of man. At first it was used for warming and lighting, and only then began to be used for cooking. As scientists have proven, this gradually changed and appearance human, and the energy of the human body, making it more powerful than any other mammal. It is estimated that a higher mammal consumes approximately 125,000 kilocalories per kilogram of body weight in a lifetime, and modern man- six times more, about 750 thousand kilocalories per kilogram of weight.
All further gains in culture, technology and management are due to the integrated use of fire. Ceramic production, metallurgy, glass-making, steam engines, the chemical industry, mechanical transport, and finally, nuclear power engineering are the result of the use of high and ultra-high temperatures, that is, the result of the use of fire on a higher, qualitatively different technical basis.
Incendiary matches first appeared only in the early 30s 19th century. Initially, they were long wooden sticks with a head at the end, made from a mixture of powdered sugar and Bertolet salt. The end of such a match fell into a jar of sulfuric acid, which is why the match was lit. In 1835, an Austrian student, Irini, invented the friction match. The match head was first covered with sulfur, after which it was lowered into a special mass containing flammable phosphorus in its composition. To ignite such a match, it is enough to strike it against any wall or other rough object. Irini sold his invention for a pittance (100 guilders) to the wealthy manufacturer Roemer, who very quickly made a huge fortune in the manufacture of matches. 13 years after the invention of Irini, the German scientist Better began to produce a mass for match heads from a mixture of bartholium salt and manganese peroxide. Such matches are ignited by friction against a piece of paper coated with red phosphorus mixed with glue. For the first time, Better's invention began to be used in Sweden, and such matches were called "Swedish".
) learned to use fire. At the same time, it should be noted that initially they did not make fire, but found it: for example, they used smoldering firebrands formed during a lightning strike or an eruption.
Only after millennia did man learn the secret of making fire. The fire changed life drastically. He gave heat, scared away predators, allowed to cook food, which became more varied and tastier.
In addition, the fire brought people together. Sitting around a burning fire, they communicated with each other more, and this contributed to their mental and social development.
The ability to use fire originated over a million years ago. It was possible to get fire from spontaneous combustion of peat, hitting a tree, fires or volcanic eruptions. Burning coals were probably stored in special containers and used if necessary.
As a result, man became less dependent on natural conditions. The fire gave him the opportunity to keep warm, increasing the chances of surviving in a cold and inhospitable climate.
With the development of fire, the art of cooking was born. This led to a significant improvement in its palatability and made it possible to expand the diet. Using the flame, people were able to make more advanced tools.
Mining fire
But it took another tens of thousands of years for a person to understand that fire can also be kindled and controlled by oneself. Realizing this, the ancient people invented the hearth, and then brought it into their homes.
In order to intensively twist the stick inserted into the hole, use the bowstring. A bowstring wound on a stick constantly twists it in the hole until smoldering particles appear. These particles flare up for a short time and therefore must fall on a long smoldering tinder.
How to make fire
But how exactly did primitive man make fire? The first methods of kindling a fire were based on the long-term friction of two dry pieces of wood against each other.
Later, a dry stick was inserted into the hole of the dry board, which was continuously rotated with downward pressure between two thumbs until the dry grass in the hole flared up from friction. This method required skill. It is still used by the natives and.
There is another way - the non-stop friction of a dry stick in the groove of a piece of wood.
But it was possible to make fire with the help of a bow. To do this, wrapping the bowstring around the stick inserted into the hole in the board, moving the bow towards you and away from you, you need to make the stick rotate quickly in the hole until a light flares up in it, which should immediately be transferred to the reed inside the candle or lamps.
Also, ancient people knew how to make fire by striking sparks. When they struck flint on pyrite (iron sulfide), the spark struck fell on pre-prepared tinder (dry grass, leaves or dry sawdust), which began to smolder. It was carefully fanned into flames.
A more advanced method was invented by the ancient Greeks - making fire with a magnifying glass or mirror, which focused the sun's beam on tinder. This method is familiar to many yard boys.
The latest invention related to the extraction of fire is the matchbox familiar to each of us, invented in the 19th century.
Even today, some peoples use the simplest methods of kindling a fire. The picture below shows the natives of the African tribe of Botswana making fire by rotating a stick in a board with their thumbs.
Prehistoric people did not know how to make fire, so the fire burned with them day and night. Food was cooked on it, it warmed people and protected them, scaring away wild animals.
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Since ancient times, man has used fire. In some caves of Europe, Africa and other continents, people existed more than hundreds, thousands of years ago, vivid proof of this is the burnt bones, the so-called "evidence", which indicate that someone made a fire in the caves. Many historians have always been interested in the question of the use of fire by ancient man. However, the most intriguing thing is how the fire appeared; in the caves of people, that is, how exactly they learned to use it. A lot of conjectures have been built on this topic, from mythical and religious, to purely pragmatic, based on geographical methods.
Scientists agree on one thing, at first, the first people learned to use it, and only then breed it on their own. The appearance of fire among people was episodic, very rare, for example, lightning hitting a tree trunk or volcanic eruptions. In Zoroastrianism (the cult of fire in Iran and some other countries), before the advent of Islam, fire was considered alive.
Because a fountain of oil was sometimes knocked out in the desert and ignited under high temperatures, for primitive man it was nothing but a miracle, so the cult of fire took great roots in the peoples who inhabited the current Middle East until the Middle Ages. But how people made fire is a rather complicated question. After all, in the desert it could appear from under the ground, in the forests it could arise during a forest fire. In most cases, until a person learned how to create it himself, the fire from a burning tree was constantly maintained for decades! And the loss of it, in practice, meant for the tribe or group of people death from the cold.
There are a lot of guesses on how exactly a person lit the first fire on his own, but in principle, it is not so important how exactly he lit it. Much more important is how a person uses fire for his needs. Primitive people began to use fire not only for cooking, but also for processing various materials. Starting with the firing of clay pots, continuing with the smelting of copper, and later iron.
The most common theory, as a person noticed that copper and iron can be smelted, is the pieces of copper lying around the fire (looking like ordinary stones), which the person paid attention to. Separate "stones" (which turned out to be copper) began to melt, however, when a person removed the fire from them, they solidified and took the form that was formed by him. Over time, it became unimportant for a person how the fire burns, because he himself learned to kindle it with the help of sparks from stones or flint.
Although, in different parts our planet it; could kindle it in different ways. Indians living in Alaska rubbed two stones with sulfur, then simply hit them against each other, after which they threw a burning stone into dry dust and branches. In Hindustan and on the territory of present-day China, a piece of clay was beaten against a bamboo stick, and the Eskimos beat a piece of quartz against a piece of pyrite, getting a huge sheaf of sparks. Most of the Indians in; made fire even under the conquistadors, by rubbing two sticks. In any case, every civilization on the planet, sooner or later, but learned to make fire, it became a kind of test of each future nation for the development of intelligence.
What do we know about the time of the beginning of the use of fire by ancient man? Scientifically unsubstantiated myths about the maintenance of fire by Australopithecus. Where was found ancient fire? Parallel existence of sites with and without traces of the use of fire, from the ancient Homo 1,700,000 years ago to the Neanderthals 30,000 years ago. How did the ancient people know how to do without fire, even in the most severe conditions? When and with the help of what methods did they learn to make a primitive fire on their own? How did Homo sapiens become completely dependent on him? Tells Stanislav Drobyshevsky, Anthropologist, Candidate of Biological Sciences, Associate Professor of the Department of Anthropology, Faculty of Biology, Moscow State University named after M. V. Lomonosov, scientific editor of the portal ANTROPOGENEZ.RU: first-hand human evolution.
“One of the great achievements of mankind is the ability to use fire. Modern people, without exception, in all cultures, all peoples, all tribes, no matter how wild, primitive and primitive they may be, know how to use fire, know fire and, moreover, are dependent on fire. No one lives without fire, and the wildest tribes know several ways to get it.
The question arises - how long ago did our rigid attachment to this phenomenon arise? If you look into the distance, you can see that the Australopithecus did not have anything like that. There were suggestions that the Makapansgat australopithecines used fire, because some black charred bones were found in the Makapansgat cave, and some kind of charred stones, and some kind of charred interlayers. But then it was proved that these were oxides of some kind of manganese or magnesium, something purely geological, and had nothing to do with fire.
Much has been said about traces of fire in the Zhoukoudian cave near Beijing. This is one of the most accordion themes, when from 1929 to 1936 layers of ash were found there in three layers up to six meters thick. From which it was concluded that the ancients there knew how to use fire, but did not know how to produce it. And, fearing that it would go out, they threw firewood there for literally tens or almost hundreds of thousands of years, because in terms of terms from the lower layers to the upper, a spread of three hundred thousand years is obtained. It is clear that it was not their ashes that stuck out there in a column in the middle of the cave to the ceiling, because all the surrounding deposits should be filled in this way. And on this topic - synanthropes, throwing firewood endlessly - a lot of things were invented: that they had a division of labor, that women were the keepers of the hearth, matriarchy was even dragged in, and whatever else was.
However, this turned out not to be the case. Because, despite the fact that there are traces of fire in Zhoukoudian, there are charred stones and charred bones, but these huge thicknesses of ash are not ashes, but rotten silt, which was simply washed into cracks and sediments when no one was there anymore lived. When the whole cave was clogged with sediments, washings appeared in it, and humus was washed in from above from the top of the hill, and it rotted. The result was such nonsense, similar to ashes, because this is carbon from plants. And carbon is carbon.
If we turn to reality, not the one that philosophers invented, but how it really was, it turns out that the most ancient traces of the use of fire date back to about 1,700,000 years ago. This is almost the dawn of the genus Homo. Not the very dawn, of course, after all, the genus Homo is a little older, maybe even a million years, but nonetheless. Traces have been found in various places. There are parking lots in Africa, for example, in Koobi Fora. And in the future, from 1,700,000 years onwards, these traces are found everywhere. For example, in the Caucasus, the Ainikab site. Also in Africa there are caves in Europe.
However, there are places where there are no traces of the use of fire. For example, in Sima del Elefante Cave (Spain), this is the oldest human discovery site in Europe dating back 1,300,000 years, there are deposits with tools, but there are no fires, burnt stones and burnt bones. However, there is a jaw with teeth, an isolated human tooth, on which tartar analysis was done. And a lot of interesting things were obtained from this tartar. For example, it shows the use of cereals for food, but there are no smoke particles that are found on the teeth of later Neanderthals, and there are no traces of food cooked on fire. All food is raw. From which we conclude that people in Sima del Elefante did not know fire. Moreover, this is 1,300,000 years, when it has long been known in other places "...
