Man’s First Fire
Scientists are not quite certain at exactly what point man began using fire. Early caveman period, they say. But how did the actual incident of discovering fire occur? If we use common sense, we would deduce that lightning started a fire somewhere, and the cavemen went to investigate, and said “OUCH. That’s hot”. But where did the connection of frying their meat before they ate it come from? Was one caveman in the crowd smarter than the rest, and said “Hay! Let’s cook our meat with that!”
Let’s get a little more creative. Maybe one day they wandered through the woods AFTER a fire, and found a fried rabbit. It was burnt not so bad they could still tell it was a rabbit. Not being very choosy about their meat, they decided to try a little. Found it to be quite good. Then somewhere along the line, decided they would ALWAYS cook their meat, although some of the older ones in the tribe still preferred it raw. Now they had the burden of figuring out how they would utilize this new found technology. So how did that start?
Maybe: Let’s kill a rabbit, and lay him in the woods until it catches fire and cooks him. Hard to believe anyone would be that stupid, but they WERE early cavemen. Once they discovered that the odds of that spot on earth catching fire before the rabbit rotted weren’t in their favor, they must have known they needed to figure out a way to bring THE FIRE TO THE MEAT. Holy crap. That was a good one. They probably spent years coming up with a technique to pack an entire forest, ON FIRE, back to the cave. After losing half the tribe to severe first degree burns, they gave up. Then, there was another fire nearby, and they went to investigate, and one of them found a chunk of wood only on fire at one end, and out of sheer bravery, or stupidity, picked it up by the unburned end, and RAN BACK TO THE CAVE WITH IT! When he got there, he stood with it, burning in his hand, in the middle of the cave, wishing he had sent word ahead to kill a rabbit, and have it ready to cook when he got there. (Cavemen, more than most, would have benefited from the cell phone.)
And as he stood there, the fire went out. Now what? I thought once it started it wouldn’t quit til it burned out! So he ran back to the forest for another piece, with fire still on it. Alas, when he got there the forest had burned out, but he noticed, as he walked among the embers, the same odor he had experienced with the cooked rabbit. As he danced hysterically to an unburned spot of ground, it came to him.
It was bright flashes from the sky that started the fire. (Hard to reproduce) The fire would burn itself out, and then we bring the rabbit to the now black forest and lay it on the black ground! And if the rabbit even remotely resembled his burned feet when done, it would be more than cooked, and edible. He ran back to the cave to tell the others. This was difficult, as language had not yet been invented. But the others could tell through his enthusiasm alone that he had discovered something wonderful.
It quickly caught on, and soon scores of cavemen and cavewomen would gather whenever a forest burned. It became a social life for them; they traded news, and rabbit recipes. Relationships came of these gatherings, ideas were exchanged, heads put together to further improve on their cooking techniques.
However, there were downsides to this new technology. For instance (and this was brought up at the very first meeting), fires weren’t very timely. There weren’t enough of them. They were undependable, and they still had to eat too much raw meat. They needed fire ALL THE TIME!
It’s still unclear to scientists, but there was a period during the early caveman period that they thought there was a volcanic eruption, and the ash blocked out the sun and killed half of the earth. But no, it wasn’t. It was early caveman setting the world on fire, so they could have cooked rabbit every night. You see, it was simple. You waited for the flash to start a fire, and you carried a piece of wood, burning only at one end, over to a patch of trees that WASN’T on fire, and threw it on the ground. Next thing you know, you have ANOTHER fire.
But this was a lot of work. Seems once you burn a forest, you can’t burn it again. At least not for a long time, which they didn’t know yet. So, right after dinner, you had to pack up your family, and move them closer to the next burning forest. This was actually the first implement of the “scorched earth policy”, although it had no meaning back then.
Once they had burned half the earth, trancended continents in their quest for cooked rabbit, they became tired. Some of the cavewomen got together and demanded an easier way be found. Yeah, we got to see a lot of cool places, but this has got to stop. But by this time, the cavemen had picked up a few things along the way. They now knew things they didn’t know before. They put their heads together once more, and decided for them to learn how to MAKE fire, they had to pay attention to everything that happened around them.
Then one day, one of the elder cavemen was sitting in a tree he hadn’t set fire to yet, and slid down off of it to inspect something moving on the ground. As he did so, he burned the back of his thigh on the rough wood. He also knew that if he rubbed his hands together when it was cold, it would warm them. So, what if he rubbed REAL hard? What if he took something, and rubbed it against something else just like it, and rubbed it hard? So, he set out to do that. Since he was in the woods, he picked up two sticks. As would come natural, he held one in each hand and rubbed them together. He began rubbing harder, and harder, until his forearms hurt from the effort. And right before he was forced to quit from exhaustion, he saw small puffs of smoke come from the rubbed stick, which he knew forest fires did as well. Had he almost invented fire?
He began to work on refining his technique. First, he rubbed the end of the stick on a rock until he had ground a point on it. Then he would put the pointed end into the side of another stick, and spin the stick between his hands, which created more friction with less effort. He had also seen the wind make the black forest chunks glow orange when it blew, so when his stick began to blacken a little, he blew on it. After a bit, he blew an ember onto the forest floor, and it caught fire.
There you have it. Man learned how to make fire. You would think that this man would have been revered, and held in memory for eternity. But not. Somewhere along the way, he was forgotten, and lost in history. So, this guy only got to be somebody for maybe, ten minutes. I would guess he ran back to camp, and showed the others his newfound ability. They must have applauded him, maybe give him an extra piece of rabbit. Probably didn’t even have a name. No language, no name. Recognition only. Oh, yeah, that’s the guy over in cave 4. Invented fire…………
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