Control of fire is the most important invention of human history. Only language comes close, which didn't come to a written form until 5,000 years ago. Control of fire in a systematic way occurred anywhere between 100,000 and maybe over a million years ago, presumably by our ancestor Homo Erectus. For Homo Sapiens it definitely happened during the last ice age, 2 million to 12,000 years ago. The evidence we have is from charred remains at human sites, from temperatures too hot to occur on their own as well as physiological changes suggestive of eating cooked food. Control of fire contributed to important changes in human evolution. Most importantly humans activity was not limited to daylight, providing light and warmth for the almost hairless ape. Fire allowed our ancestors to develop new kinds of tools and weapons, creating the art of metallurgy. Cooked food it is speculated contributed to physiological changes lime decreased jaw size, shorter digestive tracts, smaller teeth and a larger cranium to house our big brains which differentiate us from the apes. Our diets could contain more energy, to fuel our expensive brains and it is speculated decrease male-female dimorphism, difference in size between males and females, I suppose by increasing the food to share, reducing male competition.
How was the ability to control fire discovered? This is something we don't really know, despite our knowledge of its many effects. Humans didn't learn it from observing other animals, so far as we know. The well known explanation from Greek mythology is that fire was given to humans by the titan Prometheus who stole it from the gods. For this Prometheus was chained to a rock where his regenerating liver was to continually be eaten by an eagle. In fact the theft of fire from the gods is a recurring theme in different culture's mythologies, found among the native North Americans, though usually with animals stealing the fire. It's clear that the control of fire was an epochal event in human history for all cultures.
Sigmund Freud looking at such myths provided the most interesting if most bizarre at face value account for how fire was controlled. First in a footnote in his classic Civilization and its Discontents 1929 he speculated while admitting the paucity of evidence that the control of fire was the result of males renouncing the urge to urinate on fires they came across in nature. The pleasure of such activity can shared with other males, as women are anatomically unable to urinate on fire. One day a male renounced this infantile homosexual desire and was able to take the fire back to camp for his own use, and for females to take care of, not having the same urge to put it out.
"Psycho-analytic material, incomplete as it is and not susceptible to clear interpretation, nevertheless admits of a conjecture – a fantastic-sounding one – about the origins of this human feat. It is as though primal man had the habit, when he came into contact with fire, of satisfying the infantile desire connected with it, by putting it out with a stream of his urine. The legends that we possess leave no doubt about the originally phallic view taken of tongues of flame as they shoot upward. Putting out the fire by micturating – a theme to which modern giants, Gulliver in Lilliput and Rabelais’ Gargantua, still hark back – was therefore a kind of sexual act with a male, an enjoyment of sexual potency in a homosexual competition. The first person to renounce this desire and spare the fire was able to carry it off with him and subdue it to his own use. By damping down the fire of his own sexual excitation, he had tamed the natural force of fire. This great cultural conquest was thus the reward for his renunciation of instinct. Further, it is as though woman had been appointed guardian of the fire which was held captive on the domestic hearth, because her anatomy made it impossible for her to yield to the temptation of this desire. It is remarkable, too, how regularly analytic experience testifies to the connection between ambition, fire, and urethral eroticism."
Freud in his later essay The Acquisition and Control of Fire 1932 examined the Prometheus tale and argued that its content is fundamentally phallic. Prometheus gives fire to humans win a hollow tube, emptied of urine(?). The eagle eating his liver is the homosexual phallus, and the liver was thought to be a seat of emotions. The continual assault on the liver and its regeneration is the indestructibility of the suppressed desire to not extinguish fire. The urinary function of the penis is tied to its sexual function, as children have the theory that daddy impregnates mommy by peeing inside her.
Hercules in his legend uses fire to defeat the hydra and comes to release Prometheus. Hercules reverses what humans did; instead of putting fire with liquid, he put out the water beast with fire. By being able to relive the desire, presumably by burning things which many little boys do, man can overcome the original cost of instinct renunciation. The triumph over nature, over other beasts, paid off for the investment.
This explanation continues to offend many people, like most of Freud's theories. But when analyzing legends just like dreams, it is the latent content that is important. Humans first learn about themselves through myths, and gain knowledge about their own self through dreams. It is only after analyzing the content of these myths and dreams that we can get some understanding of the world before written language or modern notions of self-consciousness and philosophical naturalism. To argue that our ancestors discovered fire by trial and error of observation or some sort of experiment is to project our thinking into the past, a way of thinking that has grown out of and had to overcome thousands of years of myths.
I think however that Freud is missing something very important in his explanation, something from evolutionary theory which can make more sense of his explanation and not rely on myth interpretation. This factor is sexual selection, a type of natural selection in which physical traits are chosen, that is inherited, not to adapt to the environment but to increase success in mating. An example of this is the male peacock's tail which is highly visible to predators and costly to develop and maintain, but attracts female peacocks, who do not have this plumage. Traits can be selected for which do not increase environmental fitness but contribute to signaling reproductive fitness for females or help males compete. It is expected that given the difference in investment between males and females, males contributing sperm while females have to carry the child to term, females will be more "choosy" with mates and males will have to compete with other males for mates. Women limit the amount men can reproduce given that having more women than men means more offspring than more men than women (polygamy is more common than polyandry) given that human females can only have one child every nine months.
As sexual dimorphism decreases with humans, women get more power to choose on factors to their liking. The difference in size between men and women is thought to come from our more polygamous past. As we became more monogamous, male competition decreased to challenge the alpha male and females had more freedom to select mates. It's obvious what men want in females, small waist to hip ratio and large breasts. Females chose larger penises in men. Human genitals are enormous relative to other mammals, and their size does not enable greater ejaculation or urination, making sexual selection the most likely explanation for human male genital size.
We don't see many animals urinating on fires they come across as Freud speculated human males did when they came across fire. This is because humans are pretty much the only bipedal land animal. How would a wolf pee on a fire, go up to it and raise his leg? That would be too risky, and would have to be a very small fire. Or pee on top of the fire? No way. Bipedalism allows humans to be at a safe distance from the fire to urinate on it. Large penises, via sexual selection by females, would give bipedal human males aim to douse the fire.
Does it have to be urine that put out fires? Maybe not, but it makes the most sense. What else immediately available would put out a fire? Dirt? A blanket? Could use water, but that would be wasteful and have to be transported. Urine is immediately available and requires little opportunity cost to have in store, it occurs naturally in the body. Being at a safe enough distance would preclude just running away, and the fire would be dangerous enough to not want it to spread.
Coming across fire would most likely be at first an anxious experience, encountering fire from a lightning strike or bush fire directly would be unfamiliar, especially in a relatively safe position. Thus putting out the fire would be an almost instinctual reaction. It would take effort to resist the urge. Unlike Freud, I think the urge to put out the fire is not just sexual but also from fear. The anger of the gods for taking fire is our continued fear of the power of fire, the power of nature. Zeus is the one who threw lightning bolts, a source of fire. The control fire is basically a renunciation of instinct, both sexual and anxious, enabled by male physiology. The ambivalence of the encounter encourages its extinguishment.
The male ambivalence toward fire as an object of arousal and fear would only end once women also had control over fire. Women as in Freud's original formulation don't have the same urge to urinate on fire for anatomical reasons and in the presence of fire would evade or use it in a safe setting. Getting fire back to the women would be advantageous to the male who accomplished relative to other male competitors, so sexual selection again. The women at home then could use it for cooking, warmth etc according to the sexual division of labor, and not have the same urge to put the fire out. The control of fire is enabled by women, their love replaces the ambivalent instinctual relationship towards fire.
Man first learned sublimation, the channeling of sexual desires into different productive ventures, which would enable the rest of the process of civilization. Man is rewarded by woman for the triumph of intellect over the desires of the penis, as it were.
There you have it. Sexual selection meant that bipedal females chose larger penises for bipedal males who urinated on fire when encountered in nature at a safe distance, and humans learned control of fire when a male renounced the ambivalent sexual and anxious attitude towards fire and brought it home for women, and this improved his chance for mating and provided benefits for the group at large. Women protected the hearth not having the same urges to extinguish fire and used it in the sexual division of labor. But fire remains for a very long time and even today something mysterious and powerful. The renunciation of instinct and nature's control shows up in legends substituting gods or animals for men taking fire from nature and giving it to others.
In this story, humans don't yet learn how to produce fire at will. But we do learn to be familiar and comfortable around it and it's uses when it occurs in nature, bringing it to camp and getting warm, cooking food, and/or making rudimentary tools. Fire becomes the first in a long line of technological advancements which alter human nature itself.
The sexual selection explanation is as male driven as Freud's original explanation, but I'll have to look more into the decrease of sexual dimorphism and the role of female choice. My reading of psychoanalytic literature after Freud criticizes his emphasis on the phallus and the whole Oedipus complex as the determinant of human culture. Nonetheless the phallic content of the Promethean myth is important to consider. My sexual selection explanation differs from Freud's I think in giving women more of a direct role than he did.
The phallic symbolism could just be symbolism and the urination story can still be useful. The important point is that renunciation of instinctual desires towards the unfamiliar led to our control of nature. It was an internal repression of our energy channeled towards new productive means which is the basis for society. A parallel is with the domestication of dogs, which also occurred during the last ice age. We and the proto-dog wolves around our ancestors campsites had to renounce our mutual fear and desire to eat one another so we could live together. The benefits of domestication aren't as immediately obvious as evading danger or consumption of meat, for both human and dog. An affective attachment must have developed from chance, of wolves following humans and eating our leftovers, which would alleviate this anxiety. We had to take an active step to domesticate the animals and get over our fear and desires. The risk takers who went against their instincts were rewarded with man's best friend. Accomplishing this would be quite advantageous to the male and the females of the camp would be willing to care the wolves and their pups with perhaps not the same urge to evade or kill.
Before the invention of language/writing we don't have any notion what the humans who discovered fire were doing, let alone their motivations. The only currency we have from the past about this event is myth and fantasy, which is of scientific value for its latent content. All we have to infer prehistoric events are these remnants. So Freud's explanation with modifications from evolutionary thinking suffices for me.
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