[~1.8 Mya] - Fire: The Innovation that Forged Humanity and Sparked World Domination

. [00:00:00]

Introduction: Who is in control

Picture yourself on a winter evening sitting by the fireplace, feeling rather pleased with yourself. Look at me. You think Master of flame, controller of combustion. Yes, you built this fire. You fed it with your logs and you could extinguish its life if you felt like it.

How civilized and in control you are. But the fire might view it differently. Its flickering. Flames have their own hypnotizing nature that promises warmth and safety. , its light pushes off the natural urge for drowsiness of the dark. And in fact, those crackling sounds of fire call forth ancient neural pathways to huddle with friends and family and tell stories

now imagine that it's the summertime, the scent of a barbecue or watts into your nostrils. The compulsion, when we smell it to devour flame. Grilled food is as undeniable as death in taxes. The desire

for perfectly [00:01:00] smoked melt in your mouth. Food as you do the bidding of fire and not the other way round.

Fire has its own agenda and it always has. Yes, we are the species that believes we control fire, yet we are the only species that fire has completely rewired from the inside out,

You no doubt know that a fire will not spark without fuel or oxygen. While today we'll be learning how civilization itself would not exist without the combination . If humans and fire.

The Role of Fire in Civilization

Welcome to How to Change the World. I am Sam Webster Harris, and we are on a chronological journey through history's most transformative innovations.

Today discussing fire. Every [00:02:00] time you flip a light switch, you are commanding invisible fires by burning fuels in power plants. Every time you drive or fly anywhere, you're sitting on top of tiny controlled explosions happening thousands of times per minute.

In fact, your laptop and house were built using raw materials created in furnaces

we've gone from sitting around campfires in Africa to. expanding across the entire world, , and today we live inside a massive planet wide fire system that we've somehow made mostly invisible.

Fire's Impact on Predators and Prey

The story of humanity is the story of fire.

In this episode, we will go right back to the very beginning of the human story, , because fire marked the great reversal in our fortunes

A perfect demonstration can be found in cave excavations across the world, one such cave in South Africa. , at its deepest and oldest layers, we see a story of the layers of lions and leopards around the full skeletal remains of these big cats is a litter of fragmented bone, [00:03:00] shards of their various prey, gazelle, birds, even the odd hominid. Our ancestors,

a human like FEMA with some big two marks definitely reminds us of who was the boss.

But then we get to a higher stratus or layer in the cave dated from around a million years ago. And there we see the first signs of fire being used, and with it a very different story unfolding. This cave is now clearly the home of early humans

, who appear to lie at peace with their complete skeletons and around them are scattered. The bone shards of all sorts of animals, from snakes and lizards to flamingos and rats, even the nor bones of lions . With the marrow sucked completely dry. Yes. A fire not only marked the hasty eviction of cave ownership by big predators.

But more importantly, humans violently threw them off the top of the food chain

as they went from being the hunted to the hunter. Now, yes, there is a lot more to the story of fire than predator, prey [00:04:00] relationships and humans filling caves with their rubbish.

Don't you worry.

and so today we'll be exploring how this single innovation,

the domestication of fire over a million years ago transformed our species, and thenallowed us to expand across the globe and eventually gave us the power to supercharge our industrial revolution. On the way we'll explore why no other species has managed this feed, how it impacted things like gender roles. And in the final section, we will peer into the future. After all, we are living in the dawn of a possibly equal new power , from artificial intelligence.

First Fire - 500 million years ago

But firstly, long before all of that, and before we even get to the part where humans become fire wielding maniacs, we need to rewind the clock to 500 million years ago,

To us, the earth would appear like an alien planet

For a long, long time. It had just been bare rock and vast oceans that slowly became [00:05:00] filled with algae. , but now 500 million years ago, we are at a time when the first plants were trepidatious setting their roots into soil or. Should I say rock

these were plants like mosses and liver warts, and they were soon followed by the first animals crawling outta the ocean onto the land.

Oxygen levels had reached a balmy , 15 to 16%, and the last requirement to create fire was of course. A spark such as say, a lightning strike and hay presto.

The first fires

a curious insight here. If God really did make planet Earth and our beautiful ecosystems, then he was probably an avid reader of Marie Kondo and her book, the Simple Magic of Tidying Up.

When God looked over the land, he would've been troubled by the amount of

dead plants piling upWhen he saw the same species all over the place,

He would've desired them to all be in the right homes and in his excited effort to create a tidy home for his creations. By [00:06:00] far, his favorite tool would've been fire. Fire would clear out all the accumulated dead junk that piled up and put everything back in its right place, returning nutrients to soil, and creating an amazing patchwork of unique habitats , for a stunning variety of species across his beloved planet, each of which surely sparked great joy.

So if you were looking for proof that God might exist, you could possibly propose that the global average of 8.6 million lightning strikes a day is clear evidence that he does exist and that he really likes tidying up. But Fun aside fire has always been very biblical as a topic.

It is one of the essential four elements that transcends religions from a balancing force of Zen Buddhism to the punishing fire in the Qan or Norse belief of fire as both a creator and destroyer.

The long and short of this candle is

that fire became nature's reset button.

It's paradoxical for humans to realize that fighting natural fire makes [00:07:00] things worse. Like stopping a river that flows completely in its tracks, leads to it, eventually flood over in Yellowstone . Fire ranges spent decades preventing fire, and found that the ecosystems began dying

as timber and thickets built up in the undergrowth, animals and wolves disappeared. Rivers changed courses and biodiversity plummeted , without the regular guiding hand of fire to keep things in order.

In fact, so much undergrowth builds up , when we prevent fire spreading, that when wildfires eventually do start, which they will, we get these mega fires , that are much, much more destructive.

So to summarize, first fire was part of Earth's natural immune system, balancing the intricate web of life.

This unruly force was bounded by ecological common sense. , nature's rule book, if you will. And this is all crucial to remember because humans . Were about to start setting fire to everything and anything including that all important rule book.

Humans and fire - ~2 million years ago

We are now going to go through a minor time jump of [00:08:00] 498 million years to roughly 2 million years ago and into the heart of Africa.

Early human ancestors were about to make the leap from fearing fire to controlling it, representing possibly one of the most audacious experiments in the history of all of life. If you think about what our ancestors were attempting, domesticating a force that could not just kill them, but burn down their entire home and ecosystem.

There is a dubious piece of Chinese philosophy that says, build a man a fire, and he will be warm for a day. Set a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.

A stupid saying, but worth noting that,

it was a risky undertaking. Picture an early human, millions of years ago. Lightning strikes the savanna igniting a grass fire every sensible creature. Fleas, , including you, of course, but the smell of something cooking brings you to scour through the wreckage.

Whilst the embers are still smoking, , what you find is perfectly cooked. [00:09:00] Insects, roasted roots, . Barbecued small animals the meat on it practically falls off the bone. The roots were sweet and soft, and your belly feels satisfied in ways that it just never has before. And if you're thinking that what I'm saying is a silly claim, surely, before we ate cooked food regularly, we wouldn't actually want it.

Well, the opposite is true. Fire transforms food into something more edible. Tubers and meat tastes way better

to chimps and nearly all animals than giving them the raw version.

To give you perspective, chimps have even learned to wait for meat to cook. And chimps absolutely love meat. , Richard Rangu says that when they catch meat, the whole gang gets the zoomies and they jump around excitedly, enjoy the lead. Male might snatch most of it and race to the top of a tree, whilst others gleefully catch scraps or even lick drops of blood or leaves.

Yet, even they can wait patiently for meat to be cooked, showing that clearly there is a biological reason deeper than just a human preference for [00:10:00] it. However, it was only humans that made the connection that fire could be controlled to make their food tasty and nutritious, just how they like it.

The Discovery of Fire

But of course here we run into an issue. Waiting for the occasional wildfire was like waiting for lightning to charge your phone . Not only unreliable, but also the definition of overqualified. The real breakthrough was making fire portable and well, you know, a little bit smaller.

The ancient Greeks believed that the Titan Prometheus handed fire to humanity. Richard Rangu. The anthropologist likes the idea that as early Hommies were tenderizing their meat by bashing it with stones to make it slightly more edible. They might have accidentally made sparks in the occasional fire, and that might sound unlikely, but if you imagine your entire life outside and the fact that every time you ate meat you had to whack it a lot with stones, then it's not so unrealistic.

, of course, other theories suggest that humans picked up half burned logs after a fire with [00:11:00] Emil alive , and to experiment with how to build and sustain fires.

, of course, unless we build a time machine, we will never actually know exactly how humans discovered fire.

But certainly once they had, you can imagine a roaming band of early humans, , one carrying a smoldering log wrapped in green leaves. Another has learned to keep embers alive in a hollowed gord filled with dry timber.

Our early ancestors, not just using fire, , but in a relationship with it, planning ahead, thinking about fire's needs as well as their own. This wasn't just a technological innovation.

fire transformed humans from reactive creatures into planning creatures.

When did we discover Fire

And whilst we're talking about timelines, it's worth answering the question of how we know when this all first happened. Well, again, the answer is hard to know exactly, but the archeological evidence does keep pushing this date further back. As we discover new remains of older and older fires.

Not long ago, we thought the first fire was 800,000 years [00:12:00] ago, then it was 1.3 million years ago, now it seems to be 1.5 million years ago. But if we instead look at the biological evidence from human remains, it suggests that fire's influence on our evolution began around 1.8 to 2 million years ago with our ancestors Homoerectus.

So I'm going with Richard Range's estimates.

Stadium of Grandmothers

Now sticking on the topic of human evolution and Richard Ham's ideas. Here is another proposition that he made to help us grasp the scale of the changes to our species

he asks that we go on a thought experiment. Imagine arriving early at a stadium that seats 60,000 people. You sit down with your grandmother,

next to her, sits her grandmother, your great, great grandmother. And the pattern continues each seat filled by another grandmother. As you go through all your ancestors flowing backwards through time.

An hour later, the stadium has been filled in order. And the final seat is occupied. Now to your right, . She nudges your elbow, and you [00:13:00] turn to see not a human face, but something wonderfully other. A low forehead, a massive brow ridge, , a powerful jaw, long muscular arms built for climbing.

Yes, she is your ancestor,

and she's definitely getting some funny looks if she turned up to school. In these last 2 million years, evolution was in quite a hurry to change things over these 60,000 generations.

Fire's Influence on Human Biology

From climbing trees to posting tiktoks Fire has a lot to answer for. So? How did it change us?

, well, fire represented a huge leverage in energy.

I.Just as Watermills harness rivers to grind grain and windmills can capture air currents to pump water. Fire became humanity's first external energy system.

It. Performed the biological work of processing and digesting our food outside of our bodies. Cooking gelatinized starch, dena's proteins, melts fats, and makes meat and plants much, much easier to [00:14:00] chew. It also kills parasites and germs and

all of this wonderful help , contributed to the extraordinarily short amount of time that Schumers can spend chewing and digesting.

When we look at the apes, gorillas possess jaw muscles that can crack walnuts, chimpanzees have grinding teeth that can shred tree bark, and orangutans have digestive systems that can extract nutrients from very tough waxy leaves , that trust me, you would not want to put in a salad.

Humans traded all of these biological advantages to just outsource our digestion to fire.

And if you want some more perspective, a Gorilla eats 18 kilos or 14 pounds of raw food a day. Whereas we eat one and a half to two kilos of food, mostly cooked. In fact, a chimpanzee, which is only half our size, still eats twice as much as us.

And the result of this is that apes have to spend six hours a day chewing their raw food, whereas we get a sore jaw if we try to eat one large raw carrot.

[00:15:00] Jaw is so comparatively tiny and weak because we only need one hour a day to chew our very soft food,

So fire already seems to be a pretty big life hack,

but there's plenty more

When our ape ancestors finally get a break from all that chewing, you know what they're doing? , no, not procreation. They are resting and digesting for another eight hours a day. In fact on the topic of procreation, they have such little time left to them that.

The average procreation session is a whopping seven to eight seconds. , so an overlooked but incredibly appreciated impact of fire is, that we humans are lucky enough to enjoy entire minutes of naughty business when we get lucky. So I think I speak for all of humanity for a second here on the podcast when I say, thank God for fire, or Prometheus,

or your ape, like, great, great, great, great grandmother.

Okay, whilst you digest that tangent,

Fire and Human Digestion

Let's get back to discussing your anatomy. Compared to great apes, our [00:16:00] guts are almost half the size., and that's important to know because digesting is actually quite a costly thing to do, you've gotta produce lots of crazy juices and acids and maintain all of the tissues in your long gut,

which is quite nice to not have to bother doing.

but there's more cooked food, actually just has more energy in it.

A bit like when you make charcoal by basically cooking wood to make it more energy dense. zoo animals in captivity will put on weight much faster on a cooked food diet than a raw food one. and well wishes in the UK who find cute hedgehogs in their garden might kindly feel like feeding them a little bit, but quickly they'll be surprised to find that hedgehogs can become obese.

So much so that if you feed a hedgehog regularly, it'll get so fat that it can no longer roll into a ball, , which and makes the point that cooking is just a crazy leverage for our species.

We extract more calories with less effort and doing more with less is the fundamental story of human innovation that we are going to be [00:17:00] seeing time and again , as we go through this podcast, and I'll be doing a deep dive on this actual topic of energy and leverage for sure.

But remember as always, there is a trade off and you don't get something for nothing..

Humans can literally no longer survive on just raw food alone and fire is hardly a bonus. It is literally an essential requirement.

We became like an optimized engine that needs a specifically treated fuel mix, but this rocket fuel made another change in your body that made this possibly one of the best deals in history.

By outsourcing half of our digestion department to fire, we had a spare energy budget to fund the growth of the most expensive organ in the animal kingdom. Our brain.

You may have heard that it's only 2% of your body weight, yet it uses about 20% of our energy. Brains are three times bigger than our closest relatives to chimpanzees.

They may have impressive abilities to chew in human amounts of raw food for hours,

but our brains allow us to do un chimp like feats [00:18:00] of planning, cooperating and creativity, which is of course why human civilization and this podcast exists.

And that leads us nicely into the next section

when we discuss, when did all this strategizing and human planning happen?

Light and Campfires

Well, we can now discuss the second gift of fire. Now, as I'm sure you remember from your chemistry lessons, what does fire create? Yes. Heat and light.

We've already covered how we deployed the heat energy for our needs. Well, the energy release from light also gave us leverage in a different way.

Before Firelight existed, , we were just too exposed to sleep on the floor in the dark. So we slept in the trees.

Once we had a central campfire, we could stay safe on the floor and leave our life in the trees behind

Before fire, the Athene did have bipedal walking, but they still needed to climb trees regularly.

And when you look at their feet, you can see they had a big toe that was a bit more like a thumb. If you ever look at chimpanzees, you'll see that their feet literally look a [00:19:00] bit more like hands. Well, homoerectus was the first human species that was able to give up

they're climbing hand like feet, and instead get the stubby big toe , that we see today. And that allowed them to truly master by people walking, which is much more energy efficient and much better for running long distances without getting tired.

This of course, led to the evolution of other cool unique features,, as we adapted to long distance running like our sweating system and breathing regulation, which I will talk about more in the future.

But already it's amazing to consider how many knock on effects come back to just.

Having the safety of fire at night.

But these safe spaces were not just useful for sleeping, but also for hanging out. Picture an early human camp 400,000 years ago, darkness falls instead of huddling in trees. 20 to 30 humans can gather around flickering fires. Light of course, suppresses melatonin production, keeping them alert and social. Children can listen to adults weave their day's events into dramatic stories or terrible [00:20:00] jokes, The all important ritual of sitting around a campfire, farting and singing dodgy campfire songs was born,

Now in terms of knock on effects, the crafting and developing of language storytelling culture,

has a huge advancement due to the extended evening hours that we have.

If you look at the Apes, chimpanzees sleep for 12 hours, orangutan sleep for 15 hours, whereas humans get away with seven to eight hours.

Mealtimes

Okay, so whilst we are still in the topic of direct impacts on humans from fire, I have just two more reflections that we can, consider before we start to zoom out. Firstly, continuing the topic of social behavior. Food historian Felipe Fernandez arm.

Ernesto made a good point. He said that cooking created the concept of mealtimes and thereby organized people into community promoted cooperation through sharing because the cook always distributes food compared to eating as you graze, like gorillas just eat leaves as they find them .

Instead, we get the [00:21:00] concept of an actual family meal.

So cue the classic quote, A family that eats together stays together. It's honestly no surprise that desire to share meals with others is as ingrained into our culture's, religions, and psyche at a similar level to our obsession with staring at fire because for literally millions of years, . It is how we connected with each other and reflected on the day ,

and looked after each other by sharing what we had.

So both acute and important practice that I am all for.

And now my second reflection, , which is a bit more anatomical.

Fire's Role in Human Birth and Survival

As you will remember so far, we have smaller jaws and teeth for less chewing, bigger brains for more thinking and less climbing and more walking, which means shorter arms, longer legs, and narrower hips. , well, the observant anatomists amongst you might notice an issue bipedal walking with narrower hips and bigger brains.

No, no. That would be really stupid. You might say, [00:22:00] well, you would be right because it is If lightning truly was potential proof that God exists. Well, leaving women to push their giant headed babies through narrow hips

is potential proof that he actually doesn't, I mean, sure. Why not? Let's just create an extremely tight birth canal with a big twist in it for no reason. Hmm.

Well, regardless of your thoughts,

despite this being a giant pain for our species, especially the women, obviously the one thing that stopped us from being a complete evolutionary dead end was in fact cooked food. Our increased nutrition meant that we were able to start having babies earlier, and that were less grown, which means that humans have babies that are totally not ready for the world. , and yes, it still doesn't solve the problem, but it at least it helps a bit.

Human mothers used to have a one to 2% risk of dying in childbirth, which for our ancestors that had eight babies became a 10 to 20% risk across their lifetime.

If we were to compare that to other rapes , that walk on all [00:23:00] fours with their wider hips and smaller heads, well our birth risks are completely wild. Luckily today, modern medicines reduces most of these risks. But that is incredibly recent, so the fact that despite this giant biological trade off we became the dominant species, shows that fire's advantages were overwhelming.

Which leads us nicely to a new question.

Why Only Humans Mastered Fire

If fire was such an incredible advantage, why didn't any other species figure it out?

I mean, if you think about it, plenty of animals have learned to fly, which isn't exactly easy. Chameleons occupy squids.

They can change colors and melt into the background. Certain eels and fish can electrocute you. Like evolution can find a way to do some pretty difficult things.

This question is even more puzzling when you think that chimps absolutely love cooked food, they'll go completely nuts for it. In fact, Bonobos in research facilities, , they [00:24:00] have learned to pick up pans firewood when they want their dinner heated up for them.

Like they totally understand that fire plus food is delicious.

So what has stopped other animals? Well, lucky us, we had a unique combination of traits. , We had the right body, , as I said, our Ourone ancestors were bipedal, meaning they walked on just their legs that freed up their hands , which is conveniently very useful for carrying and manipulating fire , without setting yourself on fire. , remember, all other apes literally walk on their knuckles, , which is kind of inconvenient.

Secondly, we had the right minds, even before we mastered fire, , our ancestor, homo Habilis had brains that were 50% bigger than modern chimps. the extra brain power was just enough to make the cognitive leap from fire, scary to fire, useful if handled carefully.

Then after we started cooking regularly, homoerectus developed brains twice the size of chimps pretty quickly. At that point we were no [00:25:00] longer just using fire. We were thinking strategically about fire planning around fire, and probably having philosophical debates about the nature of fire.

Then lastly, we also had the right attitude.

Every other animal on planet Earth was giving a hard pass on the whole flaming death experiment business humans were the only species willing to repeatedly risk death to understand fire's patterns and subsequently push the boundaries of what was possible. As the saying goes, if you play with fire, you will get burnt.

But what the saying doesn't say. Is that you also get to rule the world

a different saying that's worth noting by Richard Nixon He says that the finest deal has to go through the hottest flames,

fire, really forged humanity into something new and as we'll start learning about later, it

also made us a pretty terrifying species for everything else on Earth.

Fire, Social Structures & Gender Roles

But before we get onto that, Let's talk about gender roles.

[00:26:00]

Okay. We've established that fire turns humans into cooking addicts that was our act one. Now it's time for a plot twist. As we reach. Roughly 400,000 years ago, as the early humans mastered fire control, it began reshaping something else entirely, our social structures and relationships.

In fact, it basically invented the concept of marriage and not in the romantic way that you're thinking. Instead, it was an economic partnership. Here's how it worked. One person specialized in the dangerous mobile work, hunting, security, et cetera, whilst the other partner mastered the complex stationary work gathering, fire management and cooking.

this wasn't about dominance by one or the other, it was literally about efficiency. If you travel to any traditional society on earth from the Inuit hunters in the Arctic, to the hads of forages in Tanzania, you will find the same division. Women run the kitchen operations , and marriage [00:27:00] fundamentally revolves around sharing food.

Among the Inuit, every wife was expected to have a substantial meal ready. When her husband returned from hunting, . The smell of boiling seal, meat, and broth would greet hunters , as they entered their igloos.

This wasn't about tradition, it was just survival economics. Now that doesn't mean that there were never arguments or toxic relationship styles. To quote, anthropologist, will Jim Stefansson, . When talking about the Inuit, he says, A wife who cooks badly might be beaten, shouted at, chaste, or have her possessions broken, but she can also respond to abuse by refusing to cook or threatening to leave.

And in case I'm giving the impression that this is something that men decided, we can look at societies where women run overthink. Instead. the mega layer people in India there, women own all the property. They make all the decisions. , and guess what? Women still do most of the cooking.

So this suggests that the patent of cooking and job roles isn't about male domination, but about practical [00:28:00] specialization that emerged from just the unique demands of a fire based food system.

So if it's not just patriarchy, let's look at the bigger picture. In the animal kingdom, mating systems adapt to their feeding systems and it's not the other way around.

So if we look at chimpanzees,, a female chimpanzee, needs support from all the males in her community to defend a large feeding territory of scattered fruit trees that she can eat from. Because of this, she doesn't bond with just one male.

Instead, she mates with all of them, and that way they have a stake in protecting her and her children. I.However, if we look at gorillas, a female gorilla can eat leaves and basically anywhere, and she doesn't need a defended food territory, rather, she just needs protection from other gorillas.

So females tend to mate with just a single dominant male.

Well, in early humans we find that fire and cooking created a completely new feeding system and that required a new social system to match it and pair bonding was the answer.

It's a partnership where each [00:29:00] person brings different skills to the table. To be clear, I don't want to give the false impression that women only ever cooked and never participated in a single hunt. We can be sure that sometimes entire villages worked together in hunts.

, occasionally the odd woman was a gifted hunter,

but it wasn't the norm whilst we were on the topic. I mentioned male aggression earlier. It turns out there was even a role for male aggression in certain circumstances.

If you've ever watched nature documentaries, you might remember seeing a cheetah killer, a gazelle with vultures circling overhead quickly, attracting lions and hyenas to steal the kill from them.

Well, a similar issue happens with humans when we cook with fire, the smoke trail broadcasts your location to every hungry human within miles. Well. Someone needed to be responsible for guarding the operation, and the husband that's willing to bonk anyone on the head for taking your dinner was a good husband.

So in fact, even today, . Psychology studies do show repeatedly that women do have, on average , a preference for men that [00:30:00] display some aggressive qualities,

which , when we look at our history, certainly makes sense to desire a man interested in hunting and defending you.

Luckily for you, we will have a huge deep dive into aggression in the next episode on language and cooperation.

But whilst we're talking about interesting psychology, here is something else that might surprise you

among the bon if people, researchers discovered that husbands were actually very chill about their wives sleeping with other guys. However. Feeding another man was an absolute no-go.

essentially that meant that sexual infidelity was an annoying but tolerable event, but food infidelity that meant immediate divorce. And the interesting thing here is it just flips our modern assumptions about what matters in a relationship.

It really shows us that early human marriage was essentially a business contract

of the wife, providing consistent high quality food preparation and fire management services in exchange for protein procurement and physical security. Now romance within that was probably a [00:31:00] nice bonus, but the core transaction was economic. sure, it does make you think of the phrase that the way to a man's heart is through his stomach.

But rather than acute saying, it's perhaps describing a fundamental basis of human pair bonding for most of our species existence until the modern day.

Role Change in the Information Age

of course we do live in a very different time now. We are blessed to live in an information age ,

where physical power and aggression isn't especially useful, and both members of a marriage can gather all the food and resources they need using just their brains.

It's crazy to realize how recent this is. In the 1980s when Margaret Thatcher was only the prime minister of the entire United Kingdom. She still took responsibility to put a meal on the table for her family every day, which is crazy and a very outdated expectation.

Things really started to change around the year 2000.

Where you can see the public interest shift. Jamie Oliver, for example, became famous with his naked chef series showing men that they can cook after all, and it might actually make them more [00:32:00] attractive to females if they can bish bash, bosh something into the oven.

this did lead to one unhappy man , pushing Mr. Jamie Oliver up against a wall and saying it was Jamie's fault, that now he has to cook three meals a week, which is just a crazy reminder how recent this change is. And on topic of recent changes, even more recently over the 2010s, many of us became incredibly time sensitive and lazy.

When we do cook, we want it ready in 15 minutes, and sadly, increasing numbers of us don't even cook at all.

Regardless if history and biology teaches anything, change is constant and those who don't adapt fall behind.

So I found this section interesting and useful to understand how things were, and also learning about why , does help us make better choices about how they could be in the future.

Fire did create the first economic partnerships between the sexes that did last for hundreds of thousands of years.

And today, as we look towards the future, they no longer [00:33:00] serve us.

Right, so we've got a bit ahead of ourselves in the timeline there

to remind you. Those changes first started happening around 400,000 years ago, and at this point, fire has transformed our bodies and societies, but its greatest test was yet to come around 70,000 years ago.

Fire's Role in Human Expansion - 70,000 years ago

Armed with our powerful fire and our increasing language and cooperation skills, humans stepped through a doorway that would lead to every corner of the earth.

Yes. Fire went beyond changing how humans lived. It changed where they could live. So think about this for a second. Polar bears can only live in the arctic. Camels can only live in deserts, and gorillas can only live in jungles. . Every other species is locked into its own specific climate zones

because of their biology. But humans said, hold my grass skirt. Why don't you? And they proceeded to franchise fire based lifestyle across the entire planet. Arctic Tundra, where the air [00:34:00] freezes your lungs, no problem. High altitude mountains where there's barely any oxygen.

Sure. Easy

scorching deserts that freeze overnight where water is more precious than gold.

Yeah, why not?

Fire was humanity's first portable climate control system. We became the only species that could literally pack our preferred environment and take it anywhere.

So picture this, 45,000 years ago, the first humans reached the edge of Siberia. Temperatures dropped to minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit and Celsius. The landscape is a white hail of ice and wind that kills most mammals within hours. In fact,

No ape has ever survived in these frozen wastelands. , like, not even close,

But these humans adventuring there aren't just carrying spears and hope they are carrying fire. Smoldering embers wrapped in birch bark carefully tended for thousands of miles they can build fires in snow caves, melt ice for water and cook the few animals [00:35:00] brave enough to live in this wasteland.

Within a few thousand years, humans have spread across the entire Arctic, becoming the apex predator in earth's most hostile environment.

Terraforming with Fire

And here's another remarkable thought. Humans weren't just adapting to new environments, they were redesigning them entirely. Every human group became basically a terraforming company using fire to reshape the landscape. Like some cosmic architect with a flamethrower look at Australia.

When aboriginal people first arrived 50,000 years ago, much of the continent was dense, humid rainforest, , which is not exactly the Australia we know in love today. A

that's because Australia, as we know it, is a human creation. The Aboriginal fire management transformed rainforest into the fire, adapted eucalyptus forests, Or grasslands , and that's what defines modern Australia. They didn't just move to Australia. They built Australia.

The entire continent is essentially a giant landscape architecture project.

The exact same thing happened in North [00:36:00] America. When European settlers arrived, they were amazed by the pristine wilderness. Endless prairies stretching into the horizon perfectly maintained forests, ideal hunting grounds everywhere. , they didn't realize is that this natural landscape was the result of Native Americans using controlled burns for thousands and thousands of years to create and maintain these ecosystems,

those beautiful prairies, perfectly spaced forests, , were just a recent phenomenon of human created habitats.

It shouldn't really have been a surprise. Basically, every early human civilization used fire to control their environment. European farmers were burning stubble to return nutrients to soil.

African pastoralists used fire to maintain grasslands for cattle. Asian rice farmers , used control burns for pest control.

Then, of course, clearing forests makes easier hunting grounds . And land that's recently been burned makes it very easy to track animals.

There's even good evidence , that our ancestors would use fire to build gullies into their landscapes. That [00:37:00] migrating animals would then be driven down, so the humans could just create a killing ground during migration period.

Overall, this really marks a huge gap between humans and animals. The power of most animals depends on basically their own bodies, the strength of their muscles or the size of their teeth. Even the bird utilizing air currents is reliant on the breadth of their wings, , and they can't exactly decide where the air current will be.

However, with fire, even a single human child with the right tools could burn down a forest in a matter of hours.

So with this great power, it's no surprise that within 60,000 years of leaving Africa, humans had established fire based settlements on every continent except Antarctica.

It was the world's first truly global franchise, which is not bad for a species that started out by getting eaten by leopards in African caves.

What I find especially crazy about this is that we did all this before we invented writing or agriculture before we even invented the wheel, but as we're going to see in the rest of [00:38:00] this season, in the Stone Age, fire alone wasn't quite enough to turn humans from a small population of African apes into the dominant species, across every single continent.

We have to develop sophisticated language and tools as well.

However, it's important to note that this world domination would've been impossible without fire, and that is the power of a truly transformative technology. It doesn't just change what you do, it changes what's possible.

The Industrial Revolution and Fossil Fuel

Okay, so that covers fire's. Greatest hits from the stone Age through to global human domination,

transforming both humans and landscapes over hundreds of thousands of years. However, very recently in relative terms, in the 19th century, everything changed again. When we learned how to burn the past itself.

Before that, humans had a very straightforward relationship with fire. We burned stuff that was alive [00:39:00] or had been alive very recently. Wood from trees, grass from fields, maybe some dried dung if we were feeling fancy, and these fires had very natural limits on them.

Trees, of course, take decades to grow back. Grass grows seasonally. Even dung requires animals that need food and time to produce. More D.

But in the 19th century, we broke the rules of this energy game with the use of fossil fuels.

So picture this, you are Thomas Newman in 1712, and you've just built the world's first practical steam engine. But instead of feeding it wood from the forest outside,

you're shoveling in chunks of black rock that formed from ancient swamps 300 million years ago. You are quite literally burning the carbon ferous period. This marks a fundamentally different relationship with energy. Those cold deposits are compressed time, millions of years of ancient sunlight stormed in the form of plants and animals , crushed by geological eons. This is an [00:40:00] incredibly concentrated form of energy waiting for some clever apes to figure out how to release it all at once.

So what made these fossil fuels such a game changer? Well, Well, by relying on living materials, you are constrained by what nature can produce each year. But with fossil fuels, there are no ecological limits. You can burn coal in winter, when the trees are dormant, you can burn oil in deserts where nothing grows, and you can keep on extracting energy faster than any ecosystem could replenish it.

You think of burning living material, like living off an allowance. Fossil fuels is like discovering a quadrillion dollar trust fund, and you can just spend it as fast as you want with no regard for natural cycles or ecosystem limits.

And the result is a huge and glorious energy abundance beyond anything humans had ever experienced.

We could power machines 24 7, heat entire cities through winter transport goods across continents in just a few days.

Things that were unimaginable beforehand. , within just a single [00:41:00] lifetime of the Industrial revolution, humanity had crossed a threshold that we couldn't uncross. Our society became dependent on.

Energy use levels impossible to achieve by burning living materials alone.

To put our energy demands in context to power New York City with firewood, you'd need to be clearing entire forests every day.

What happened is that we accelerated into the future by borrowing from Earth's past,

If you think, I want to elect you now about the morality of the industrial revolution, far from it, it was undoubtedly a very useful step forwards. Without it, we wouldn't have our modern healthcare or our knowledge economy, and instead we would almost certainly still have the slave trade because human society has always needed a cheap source of manual labor that only fossil fuels were able to replace

but this created an existential challenge.

It put us in a race against time to innovate new energy systems before our current ones run out, or we accidentally cook the planet beyond [00:42:00] recognition.

The Race for Renewable Energy

we can't simply stop burning fossil fuels overnight. Our transport systems, healthcare infrastructure, food production, digital networks, et cetera, on them completely. Cutting off tomorrow would be a catastrophic event

leading to billions of people dying, and civilization would take a giant step backwards.

Equally though, it's literally impossible for us to carry on as we are indefinitely simply by the fact , that we would actually run out of fossil fuels, if the biosphere doesn't have more problems beforehand.

So the next test of human ingenuity asks us if we can innovate our way outta the fire trap that we have created. The next few decades will determine whether fire remains humanity's greatest ally or becomes our final adversary. I.Now, of course I'm an optimistic person, , so I feel pretty sure we will be okay, , but it's important to not be fooled by thinking that the rise of electric cars will solve everything , when there is the shipping and air industry, plastics, fertilizers, all of which are completely dependent on fossil fuels currently, [00:43:00] and without which we would be toast.

However, nothing drives human ingenuity like some urgency and some of the next great businesses our times will be solving these problems.

Today - Reflecting on our lessons

And so

that leads me into the final section on the lessons for our future.

So let's begin by reflecting that fire still does have a will of its own. It burned London to the ground, Chicago Dresden. And it does like to remind us that we really are junior partners in a relationship that began 2 million years ago.

Here is an incredible quote. When they burned the library of Alexandria, the crowd cheered in horrible joy. They understood that there was something older than wisdom and it was fire . And they understood that something was truer than words and it was ashes.

. I started this episode by asking whether we control fire or fire controls us. The answer, as we have discovered is both.

Animals need food, water, and shelter to [00:44:00] survive, but only humans need fire as well.

making us both the smartest and the most dependent creatures on Earth.

Beyond that fire shows us that truly transformative technologies that are at a level 10 on the Innovation Richter scale. They don't just change what we do, they change what we are If we think of fire as simply a tool that would be wrong, it gave us new bodies, minds, social structures, and today we stand at another threshold.

AI: The Next Transformative Force

Artificial intelligence represents the next potentially transformative force. Something that could reshape us as dramatically as fire. Once did

fire was there to do our digesting for us and let us invest in thinking, well, AI now promises to do our thinking for us, whether that be driving our cars to doing our homework, performing surgery, or deciding a illegal outcome.

What this then frees us up to do, we don't even know.

But then a chimp had no idea that it might enjoy a bit more time for sex. If you took away 80% of the [00:45:00] time needed for chewing and digesting. So who knows what's ahead of us.

Could be unimaginably better than anything you might think of. Regardless. Just as fire once transformed, ape-like creatures in African caves, into globe spanning humans, artificial intelligence may transform these smartphone carrying humans into something equally unrecognizable.

Making any current debates about AI is quaint as early humans arguing about whether to trust fire.

Nevertheless, I think we can be certain about at least a few lessons from our relationship with fire in regards to ai.

Firstly, we may not stay in control.

Fire first started long ago , as nature's answer, to fight back against entropy,

Just as your own house becomes messy and you might fight back against the mess with a cleaning spree. Fire is nature's way of cleaning the house. But what happens if AI feels the same way about putting us back into shape in the way that it sees fit? We might not like what it comes up [00:46:00] with, but could it actually be better for us?

Who knows?

The other control aspect is that just as fire shaped us. Whilst we shaped it . AI will probably change us in ways that we don't anticipate or intend.

And the benefits might come with hidden costs.

Fire, gave us bigger brains, but childbirth became much worse. And our body is completely dependent on cooked food. And our society runs on energy abundance. AI may enhance our capabilities, but it will make us codependent on its digital systems.

When all our cars are autonomous. When robots perform all our manual work and write most of our software, we wouldn't even know how to do it ourselves if we needed to.

We might well look back on these jobs with the same horror that we look back on the slave trade.

Which leads to the third point that there will be no going back. Once humans became fire dependent, they couldn't return to their pre-fire existence. We simply can't survive on raw food even if we wanted to. We just can't physically chew carrots for [00:47:00] six hours a day, let alone digest them.

Just a decade after the smartphone became popular, many people

found life impossible to navigate if they lost their phone, let alone thinking about what happens when your email and bank account gets hacked. Well, with ai, we face the question of how much more dependent will our relationship be with technology?

And if the past is anything to go by, the next leap, will probably be as irreversible as it was with fire.

And finally, I think we can expect the transformation to be total

In the same way that fire didn't just change human technology, it changed human biology, psychology, and society. AI's impact may be equally wide spanning and comprehensive. In a thousand years, humans will look back at us as a different species , with our pathetic tools are uncivilized behaviors and are dangerous lifestyles.

And I'm sure they will be very grateful. , they weren't born in such a dark and terrible age.

They might well make some notes about, the odd thing they can learn about us that perhaps [00:48:00] applies to them in their day, but mostly they'll probably forget about them.

Reflections on Fire and the Future

It has been said by several people that when it comes to ai, we are playing with cosmic fire. , and I think we've learned in this episode that it's actually a pretty accurate description. Fire was the greatest form of leverage in the history of our species , and artificial intelligence might well represent an even bigger event

as humans continue to move forward into an age of transformative technologies beyond our imagination. . Fire's. Greatest lesson for us might be

that the most powerful innovations are not simply tools that we use, but they are partners that we must learn to live with. ,

so a good reason hopefully, to listen to the rest of the show as we explore everything that we can about changing the world.

And the next episode where we'll be learning all about systems thinking.

That certainly relates to this episode. For me, the topic of fire's impact on humanity definingly important it is to us. Even in Yuval Noah [00:49:00] Harare's book Sapiens, he had less than a page on the topic of fire.. sorry. I hope you enjoyed this deep dive to learn more about it.

Premium and Book resources

For anyone wanting more, I'm excited to launch a premium membership hopefully by the end of summer. Uh, so not straight away, but I do so much research for each episode. I thought it would be nice to share some of all the chaos that I have to cut out to get to a sensible episode, but some extra nuggets that I'll be able to talk about in the premium layer in regards to this episode feature fascinating topics like anatomically, should a vagina be located where the belly button is. Who knows, how do you cure hedgehog obesity? How much do gorillas poop a day? Yes, all the things you wish you knew.

As well as that, some more sensible topics like my ratings and summaries of the best books on the topic of fire mindset, lessons for world change from fire again. Then fact checking myself on things that I had to skip over quickly and feel awkward about. And of [00:50:00] course, looking more deeply into the research of just how attracted women really are to aggressive males.

So for anyone who wants a more unstructured download of all my chaotic extra research that will be for you, or if you simply want to support me and the podcast, it would be appreciated. And I will announce it when it's launched later this year. This is just a teaser to let you know it'll happen eventually.

My main sources for this episode were Richard Ran Gum's book Fire, how Cooking Made this Human, Stephen Pine's book on the Racine and Francis Burton's book on fire and how light shaped our evolution.

This episode was researched, written, recorded, edited, produced, and everything else you can think of All by me, Samuel Webster Harris , Francisco Kaha did the artwork and Jeremy Ends was a very useful podcast mentor who I cannot recommend highly enough. I.If you wish to give me a hand, you can leave a review

or share the episode with a friend who [00:51:00] likes burning things

and tell them that you've been thinking about them.

And on that, a final quote in the 2016 Song, dead Ringer By Knocked Loose. Brian Garris sings. I always watch the mountains as they look down on storms.

Humans may have used fire to do many things, but it surely looks down on us. With its 500 million year wisdom storms come and go with a frantic energy.

And in perspective, we definitely look more like a storm than a mountain. So as we go forwards, we can at least be humbled by the powers that have existed long before us, and we'll continue long after we are the crumbled ashes of a page in the history of the universe.

So stay curious people and as always, remember what we know is a drop and what we don't know is an ocean.