[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)
(HTM) web link (www.pnas.org)
(TXT) 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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