[HN Gopher] Fire use: The first signal of widespread cultural di...
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Fire use: The first signal of widespread cultural diffusion in
human evolution
 
Author : harscoat
Score  : 41 points
Date   : 2021-07-30 11:29 UTC (11 hours ago)
 
web link (www.pnas.org)
w3m dump (www.pnas.org)
 
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| In USSR there was a very popular children book on this subject,
| "The adventures of a prehistoric boy" (Aventures d'un petit
| garcon prehistorique en France). Central plot element was
| mismanagement of the perpetual fire by the titular boy, which led
| to his banishment from his tribe, and his quest to survive and
| bring fire back to his people.
| 
| As a child, I surely enjoyed this story and would recommend it to
| anyone.
 
  | xkeysc0re wrote:
  | You might enjoy this film -
  | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quest_for_Fire_(film)
 
    | Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
    | Guy from _Twin Peaks_ , girl from _Commando_ , and _Ron
    | Perlman_! Definitely worth checking out!
 
| somewhereoutth wrote:
| Bad day for the rest of the animals when humans first learned to
| control fire. Pretty much game over.
 
  | Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
  | Game over for other animals was the developer of cognitive
  | abilities and invention of speech. _That_ allowed humans to
  | kill all competing predators and megafauna, even without fire.
 
  | gogopuppygogo wrote:
  | Now we are using advancements in our control over energy
  | resources to make it so earth is unable to sustain human life.
 
    | bpodgursky wrote:
    | Ah yes, that explains why there are 7.6 billion humans now.
 
      | lisper wrote:
      | Give it another 50-100 years.
 
  | trhway wrote:
  | Once we learn to control antimatter it will be bad day for the
  | Galaxy.
  | 
  | >lead us to hypothesize that at the latest by 400,000 y ago,
  | hominin subpopulations encountered one another often enough and
  | were sufficiently tolerant toward one another to transmit ideas
  | and techniques over large regions within relatively short time
  | periods.
  | 
  | The study suggests pretty "rosy" cultural diffusion. Would say
  | capturing/kidnapping and forcing to divulge the secret qualify
  | as sufficiently tolerant transmission of ideas? Imagine the
  | smell of cooking meat coming from the other side of the valley
  | while you're chewing on a piece of raw meat under the cold rain
  | :)
  | 
  | I wonder can it instead of "transmission" be that the fire-
  | capable just out-competed the rest and dominantly spread all
  | over the place as a result.
  | 
  | Another possible interpretation is "genetic transmission"
  | instead of "cultural transmission" like it is suggested for the
  | stone tools here (while i don't agree with such hypothesis
  | (pity as it leads to a lot of interesting conclusions,
  | including ones about modern world), people do write scientific
  | articles on it)
  | 
  | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5066817/#:~:tex...
 
    | neatze wrote:
    | The myth of the peace-loving "noble savage" is persistent and
    | pernicious. Indeed, for the last fifty years, most popular
    | and scholarly works have agreed that prehistoric warfare was
    | rare, harmless, unimportant, and, like smallpox, a disease of
    | civilized societies alone.
    | 
    | Lawrence Keeley's groundbreaking War Before Civilization
    | offers a devastating rebuttal to such comfortable myths and
    | debunks the notion that warfare was introduced to primitive
    | societies through contact with civilization (an idea he
    | denounces as "the pacification of the past").[1]
    | 
    | [1] https://www.amazon.com/War-Before-Civilization-Peaceful-
    | Sava...
 
      | EthanHeilman wrote:
      | I agree with your main point that prehistoric warfare and
      | violence was not rare.
      | 
      | I'm not sure I'd frame it as most scholarly works getting
      | this wrong. Almost all scholarship I've encountered in the
      | last 25 years agrees with the position that both
      | prehistoric warfare was common and that relationships
      | between hunter gather societies often included violence.
      | There is an open question of exactly how violent (extremely
      | violent, frequently violent), but one would be hard pressed
      | to find credible scholars arguing that mass violence was
      | almost unheard of in pre-history.
      | 
      | Going all the way back to John Locke in the 18th Century
      | and before that to Biblical understandings of pre-history
      | there was a notion that past human arrangements were
      | extremely violent. There was some trendy early and mid 20th
      | Century scholarship that attempted to argue that mass
      | violence was a disease of the civilized societies, but such
      | arguments were, as far as I can tell, only fashionable
      | because they rejected the assumed status-quo.
 
    | aaaxyz wrote:
    | >I wonder can it instead of "transmission" be that the fire-
    | capable just out-competed the rest and dominantly spread all
    | over the place as a result
    | 
    | One argument against that is that transmission is much more
    | frequent than replacement in human history. We have countless
    | examples of technologies (agriculture and writing notably)
    | being transmitted to different cultures, whereas the examples
    | of cultures out-competing and replacing others through
    | technology are rare.
 
      | trhway wrote:
      | >the examples of cultures out-competing and replacing
      | others through technology are rare
      | 
      | Alexander the Great - phalanx with resulting spread of
      | Greek culture over all the Middle East, Roman Empire -
      | countless advantages over the cultures they dominated,
      | Vikings - sea faring ships and navigation,
      | Columbus+/Americas and the whole colonial period across the
      | world, ...
 
        | aaaxyz wrote:
        | I used the word culture but I really meant population in
        | the sense that the original commenter used it (i.e. a
        | group of people replacing or displacing another, rather
        | than imposing their customs on another).
 
    | sudosysgen wrote:
    | We would see genetic evidence of that, but it's missing. So
    | cultural diffusion is most likely.
 
| pratik661 wrote:
| Fire and agriculture fundamentally changed human evolution to the
| point where most humans won't survive without fire or agriculture
 
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