Wild Free and Happy Sample 64

 [Note: This is a new section from the rough draft of Wild, Free, & Happy. This is probably the end of the body text.  These samples start with sample 01, and follow the sequence listed HERE (if you happen to have some free time). 

Helter Skelter

Stephen Pyne has spent a lifetime thinking about fire.  Without the ability to use fire as a powerful tool, humans could have never migrated out of tropical Africa and colonized the outer world. 

When human pioneers eventually reached the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East, they discovered plant and animal species that were especially ideal for domestication.  This region became known as the Cradle of Civilization.  Its development enabled us to accelerate our long and painful march to the staggering eco-horrors of today. 

Pyne is especially concerned about industrial fire.  Its combustion of fossil fuel results in carbon emission levels that are turbocharging an angry swarm of catastrophes.  “Our ecological effects have had the impact of a slow collision with an asteroid… together we have so reworked the planet that we now have remade biotas, begun melting most of the relic ice, turned the atmosphere into a crock pot, and the oceans into acid vats.”

Fire made us the unusual creatures we have become.  Our colonization of the world was like a spreading human wildfire that expanded across unspoiled wildernesses in search of fuel.  We enjoyed feasting on megafauna until they became scarce, at which point we advanced into new regions.  Over time, hungry humans ran out of unoccupied territory to expand into.  Oh-oh!

Groups had to revise their menus to include different food sources.  Aggressive groups could attempt to smash their way into territories inhabited by other groups.  As the millennia passed, and populations grew, friction between groups increased and spilled blood became more common. 

Weaker groups were more likely to be swept aside.  For example, of all the surviving wild cultures, the San people have the oldest DNA.  Their time-proven way of life was incredibly sustainable.  Their original homeland territory was vast, but over time, farmers and herders eventually snatched most of it away, forcing the San to retreat to the harsh Kalahari Desert.  By the 1970s, their traditional way of life had taken a serious beating.

Alfred Crosby summed up a bedrock lesson of history: “Winning streaks are rarely permanent.”  Like the traditional San people, most of the countless wild cultures that once existed sooner or later got blindsided by stuff like disease, colonization, capitalism, genocide, urbanization, and so on.  The wild cultures that still survive are not safe and secure.  Intruders from the outer world rarely enjoy a warm and fuzzy reputation for being kind and caring ladies and gentlemen. 

Meanwhile, in the fast lane, the human wildfire learned how to paddle down rivers, sail across oceans, roll on railways, drive across continents, fly through the clouds, zoom to the moon, vaporize cities, produce enough food to feed billions, blindside a stable climate, exterminate vast forests, and turn Earth into a loony bin for hordes of lost and confused primates.

Big History is a million-page catalog of countless bloody dog-eat-dog conflicts between tribes, nations, religions, and empires.  The strongest usually triumphed over the weakest, because the weak had no right to what they could not defend.  But those who remained in the fast lane were still vulnerable to getting blindsided by brutal surprises.

Sadly, glowing screens and motor vehicles are more precious than wooly mammoths or healthy planets.  The wizards of progress are guiding us toward a future of unimaginable prosperity, decarbonized energy, and tremendous achievements in family planning.  Everyone will eagerly cooperate.  Really?  Well, if you believe it, it’s true!

Animal in the Mirror

Pyne noted, “Without fire humanity sinks to a status of near helplessness, a plump chimp with a scraping stone and digging stick, hiding from the night’s terrors, crowding into minor biotic niches.”  In other words, an ordinary wild animal.

Since Neanderthals disappeared from the stage, our closest living relatives are now the chimps and bonobos, with whom we share up to 99 percent of our genes.  They have lived in the same forests, in the same way, for several million years, without degrading their ecosystem, starting a fire, or fooling around with tools fancier than sticks or stones.  They luckily benefit from their isolation, and the fact that their traditional habitat does not contain valuable resources that are tempting to greed monsters from outer space.

In his book Grandfather, Tom Brown shared a beautiful story he heard from his mentor Stalking Wolf, a traditional Apache from desert country, who traveled widely over the years, from the Amazon to Alaska, living off the land, and learning from it.  One time, while in Alaska as winter approached, he frantically had to stock up on food and firewood for the coming months. 

A bit later, when the snows arrived, he became fascinated by the ptarmigans, birds that survived in the frigid climate by their wits alone, sleeping in cozy snowdrifts.  They belonged in this arctic land, like the lizards belonged in Death Valley.  Lizards could not survive in Alaska, and ptarmigans could not survive on the desert. 

With the use of specialized tools, our species could survive almost anywhere.  But Grandfather felt uncomfortable because humans without fire and tools can only survive in special ecosystems.  He deeply wanted to genuinely belong somewhere, like the ptarmigans and lizards.  Over the passage of time, their way of life had become fine tuned for surviving in the ecosystems they inhabited.

Dear reader, this is a tremendously important point.  Animals that are wild, free, and happy are perfectly at home in the wild ecosystems they inhabit.  Like squirrels in an oak forest, they live where they belong, and remain intimately attuned to their habitat.

Our hominin ancestors fanned out across the planet, and eventually generated assorted impacts, including numerous extinctions.  Today, most of the mob of eight billion no longer lives and thinks like healthy wild animals.  A number of cultures have developed worldviews and lifestyles that are self destructively unclever, and ferociously brutal to the family of life.

Jay Griffiths wrote that humans evolved as highly alert nomadic hunters and foragers.  “We were made to walk through our lives wildly awake.”  Modern lifestyles are often mind-numbing routines — the opposite of the freedom we so deeply need.  When healthy wildness deteriorates into passive obedience, we become vulnerable to the burning pain of cage rage.  Very often, the daily news seems to be a barrage of batshit crazy cage rage stories from a wheezing world.

Timothy Scott Bennett concluded that we modern consumers were born and raised in captivity, something like zoo animals, the opposite of free, wildly awake, and at one with the land.

Robin Wall Kimmerer is a Potawatomi biologist.  One of the spirits in their tribal traditions is Windigo, a monstrous demon cursed with a voracious appetite.  The more it eats, the hungrier it becomes.  In the old days, Windigo was notorious for hunting too hard, and not sharing with others, leading to hunger times.

Later, uninvited pale faced invaders from outer space smashed into tribal lands.  Native folks were stunned by their pathological foolishness.  Around the world, colonists have now created countless Windigo whirlwinds of mining, deforestation, industrial agriculture, overhunting, and insatiable shopping. 

Today, the hurricane of daily news from around the world shouts that the Windigo spirit has become a horrific global superpower.  Billions of folks everywhere eagerly dream of having more, more, more.  Even the superrich are maniacally grabbing and hoarding as much status glitter as possible.  This is not the path to a balanced and healthy future.

The Future?

In the preceding pages, I have explored my core question: how did things get to be this way?  Now what?  Humankind is deep in overshoot, and zooming down the path to a treacherously exciting future without brakes or safety nets.  My computer has a wonderful Undo function that can easily vaporize a sequence of mistakes.  Nature does not.  If you broke it, you bought it.

For folks who have more than a dozen working brain cells, the growing number of climate change reports and news stories are overwhelming.  It’s not a fake news hoax (unless you pretend it is).  Indeed, folks who yank off their blinders can discover a nonstop firehose of heartbreaking stories about floods, furious storms, heat waves, droughts, crop failures, melting glaciers, massive wildfires, and on and on — week after week after week.

Our foolishly unclever culture, hobbled by limited understanding and foresight, has successfully conjured into existence a colossal whirlwind of bad juju.  Eight billion consumers, with their famously big brains, are stampeding down the fast lane to a turbulent blind date with the rough justice of overshoot.  How embarrassing!

Fare Thee Well!

Dearest reader, congratulations!  One way or another, you’ve arrived at the skanky rear end of this word dance.  Pressure is visibly rising around the world, rivets are popping on the Titanic, and the global circus has become a freakshow of wildfires, climate catastrophes, conspiracy theories, religious fanaticism, cocky neofascism, merciless dog-eat-dog greed, berserk cage rage, pathological status seeking, fire-breathing patriarchy, and all-purpose bad craziness.  Something seems to be out of balance.  Like the old Chinese proverb warns, we are living in interesting times.

OK!  I’ve said what I needed to say.  I hope you’ve had some kind of meaningful experience with my literary monsterpiece.  Good luck!  Do your best!

An Innocent Booboo?

Finally, a weird idea.  Kindling the first domestic fire by spinning a fire drill stick was not, in any way, an obvious thing for a wild African primate to do.  The uncomfortable possibility is that maybe just one individual ancestor (a kid?) discovered it purely by accident, and it consequently unleashed two million years of change and catastrophe, and created the global horror show outside your window.  Whoops!  Undo! Undo! Undo!  Shit!

Wild Free and Happy Sample 63

 [Note: This is a new section from the rough draft of Wild, Free, & Happy. It’s finally getting closer to the home stretch.  These samples start with sample 01, and follow the sequence listed HERE (if you happen to have some free time). 

Welcome to the Anthropocene

Scientists enjoy categorizing, ranking, and naming.  In the realm of Earth history, they have broken the process down into a series of epochs — like the Pliocene, Pleistocene, Holocene, etc.  In the mid-1970s, some folks began feeling a need to create a new epoch, the Anthropocene, an era when human activities generated substantial eco-impacts. 

Science has not yet agreed on an official definition.  Some say it started with the explosive impacts of the Great Acceleration, which began in 1945.  Others say the Industrial Revolution (~1780).  Others say the Neolithic Revolution, the dawn of agriculture and civilization, which began about 12,000 years ago. 

Dan Flores believes that it began much earlier, during the late Pleistocene, as humans migrated out of Africa.  When they arrived in new regions for the first time, megafauna species were hit hard, resulting in a series of extinctions.  He wrote, “The Pleistocene extinctions, in other words, look very much like the first act of the Anthropocene, the beginnings of what we now call the Sixth Extinction.”

These early ancestors were successful predators because they benefitted from technological advantages including spears, slings, blades, warm clothing, and fire.  High-tech teams were able to kill powerful prey.  Their high-tech advantages enabled humans to successfully colonize much of snow country — despite the fact that their lean and nearly hairless bodies were finetuned by evolution for tropical climates. 

Close your eyes and imagine what northern Eurasia and the Americas would look like today if they had never been colonized by hominins — a vast, astonishing, Serengeti-like wild paradise of abundant life!  Wow!  Wild, free, happy… and perfectly healthy and sustainable!  Imagine that!

When our ancestors first wandered in, snow country was home to a variety of huge animals that had enjoyed living there for a very, very long time — grazers, browsers, predators, and so on.  A number of these species were originally from tropical regions of Africa and Asia, like the elephant, rhino, and sabertooth families.  Over time, these tropical megafauna species gradually evolved traits that improved their ability to survive in the cooler climate, like warm coats of thick fur.

Snow monkeys (Japanese macaques) are interesting primates.  Like our hominin ancestors, they originated in tropical Africa several million years ago.  Over time, their ancestors wandered off into the outer world, and eventually migrated from Korea to Japan more than 300,000 years ago.  Some now live in Japan’s chilly regions, where snow might cover the ground for four months, in depths up to 10 feet (3 m), and temperatures can plunge to -4°F (-20°C).

Snow monkeys adapted to snow country via a long slow process of evolution.  So now, when winter approaches, their thin summer fur automatically grows and thickens into luxurious warm coats.  During the summer, they build up body fat by feasting at the warm season buffet.  In winter months, they survive on stored body fat, and rough foods like leaves and bark.  They huddle together to keep warm.  They don’t use fire.  They’ve lived 300,000 years in Japan, and they’re still alive today because humans have allowed them to continue existing. 

Also around 300,000 years ago, Homo sapiens emerged in Africa.  From there, we migrated out of the tropics, and eventually colonized most of the world, including regions having temperate or arctic climates.  Instead of gradually evolving beneficial adaptations like the snow monkeys did, our clever technology boosted our ability to keep warm and survive in chilly places.

In modern cultures, a belief in human supremacy is the norm.  Our limitless brilliance is the mother of infinite miracles.  We’ll easily fix climate change, save the world, colonize Mars, and enjoy endless love, peace, and happiness!  The notion of Anthropocene has an aroma of human vanity.  We are the most powerful and important critters on Earth!

Welcome to the Pyrocene

The four primordial elements are earth, water, air, and fire.  Fire has existed on the planet for more than 400 million years, long before the dinosaurs.  It will continue burning long after the human circus moves off the stage, as long as there is fuel, oxygen, and spark. 

One mind-altering day, my brain crashed into the work of Stephen Pyne, the author of more than 30 books about fire, and one of the world’s foremost experts on fire history.  He described an extremely crucial turning point in Big History: the domestication of fire.  The earliest evidence of this has been found in South Africa, inside Swartkrans Cave.  It dates to about two million years ago, long before the emergence of Homo sapiens.  The two primary suspects are Homo erectus, or an earlier australopithecine hominin.  Did we drive these predecessors off the stage?

Much later, Homo sapiens inherited the knowledge of fire making, and this ability eventually enabled us to become the dominant species on Earth, and the planet thrashing demolition team of today. 

Greek mythology includes the story of Prometheus, a sassy man who stole fire from the god Zeus and gave it to humans.  Stories say that he was the inventor of the fire drill, the tool for kindling flame.  He boldly violated forbidden limits, and the gods severely punished him.  His theft initiated the dawn of human misery.

As discussed earlier (see Mother Africa), the domestication of fire began in the same general timeframe as a wave of megafauna extinctions in Africa.  Was this a coincidence?  Peter Ungar noted, “…the sudden appearance of large concentrations of artifacts and animal remains around two million years ago surely signals a change in the role of hominins in their world. 

Our ancestors had grabbed a place at the dinner table with the large carnivores.  Hominins were eating antelopes, hippos, horses, giraffes, and elephants.  Stone tools gave hominins better access to meat and marrow. 

Pyne thinks that the Anthropocene idea is too limited.  It is rooted in the emergence of agriculture and civilization.  But the primary event that made these changes possible was the domestication of fire.  So, instead of the narrower time window of the Anthropocene, he recommends the creation of a broader epoch called the Pyrocene (pyro means fire).  It would include the events of the Anthropocene.  The Pyrocene would close the curtains on the ancient Ice Age, and usher in the new and turbulent Fire Age. 

Pyne described three categories of fire. 

·       First fire is natural, sparked into flame by lightning, volcanoes, etc.  Its fuel is wood and vegetation.  This fire has existed for 400 million years.

·       Second fire is anthropogenic, ignited by hominins.  It enabled agriculture, civilization, early industry, soil destruction, deforestation, and the massive expansion of human inhabited regions.  Its fuel is wood and vegetation.

·       Third fire ripped open the trap door to hell.  Growth of the industrial era eventually required far more fuel than firewood could provide.  The heartbreaking mistake was to introduce the fire breathing monster to fossil hydrocarbons (coal, oil, gas).  Suddenly, humankind had access to a million times more energy dense combustible fuels.  Shit!  Trouble ahead! 

Carbon Cycle

NOAA calls carbon “the chemical backbone of life on Earth.  Carbon compounds influence the Earth’s temperature, make up the food that sustains us, and provide energy that fuels the global economy.”

Carbon is an element that exists in the atmosphere, oceans, living organisms, rocks, soils, sediments, fossil fuel reservoirs, etc.  This is called the carbon pool.  The pool is a magic act that allows the flow of carbon throughout the ecosystem, which is vital to the survival of the family of life.  The pool includes both carbon sources and carbon sinks. 

A carbon source emits more carbon than it absorbs.  Major sources include the burning of coal, oil, and gas, and the emissions from making concrete. 

A carbon sink absorbs more carbon than it releases.  For example, a forest is a carbon sink, and it absorbs and stores carbon as it lives and grows.  The two primary sinks in the global carbon cycle are the land and the water.

The atmosphere is neither a source nor sink.  It constantly absorbs carbon emissions, and it’s constantly a source of carbon for plant life to absorb.  In the atmosphere, carbon is allowed to pass back and forth between sources and sinks — something like a train station, an ongoing flow of in and out.

Prior to the industrial era, the carbon load in the atmosphere was a relatively stable closed loop — the volume of incoming carbon from sources was similar to the volume of outgoing carbon absorbed by sinks.

Today, that stable closed loop is long gone.  When fossil energy is burned, CO₂ is released into the atmosphere.  From there, the water sink absorbs some of it, and so does the land sink.  Unfortunately, these two sinks cannot absorb CO₂ as quickly as it’s now being emitted, so the growing surplus accumulates in the atmosphere.  Here is a chart that displays the explosive growth of global CO₂ emissions from 1900 to 2020.  Note that what the land and ocean sinks can’t absorb builds up in the atmosphere. 

With the fantastically tragic mistake of industrialization, humankind unleashed a planet roasting monster that is raging against the vitality of life on Earth — a furious roaring bonfire of fossil carbon.  This monster had been safely and harmlessly sleeping underground for millions of years.  Unfortunately, some goofy smarty pants could not leave it alone, and all hell broke loose.  Big Mama Nature screamed!

The normal and natural balancing act of atmospheric carbon got slammed.  In 1850, the atmosphere contained 280 ppm of CO₂ (parts per million).  In 2024 it’s up to 426 ppm and growing.  Consequently, the CO₂ content of the atmosphere is now higher than at any time in the last 3.6 million years, and its volume is skyrocketing now.  The planet’s climate is going batshit crazy, and the worst is yet to come.  Ooops!

Global CO2 Emissions is a chart showing carbon emissions from 1800 to 2006.  The four nations that emit the most carbon are highlighted.  Note the enormous surge of carbon emissions since 1930!

As we burn fossil energy day after day, year after year, faster and faster, enormous amounts of ancient carbon are released into the atmosphere, where it constantly accumulates, clobbers climate stability, and generates heat waves, droughts, catastrophic floods, monstrous storms, and huge wildfires.  Earth is getting hotter and hotter.  Thawing permafrost is releasing huge amounts of methane.  Glaciers are shrinking, sea levels are rising, the family of life is getting brutally bludgeoned.  Circle what is wrong in this picture.

If humankind suddenly went extinct next week, the permafrost would continue thawing, releasing additional methane, trapping more heat, and further boosting the temperature of the atmosphere and oceans.  And every day we keep burning like crazy.  The pyromania genie cannot be put back into the bottle.  Sorry kids!

Wild Free and Happy Sample 08

[Note: This is the eighth sample from my rough draft of a far from finished new book, Wild, Free, & Happy.  I don’t plan on reviewing more books for a while.  My blog is home to reviews of 199 books, and you are very welcome to explore them.  The Search field on the right side will find words in the full contents of all rants and reviews, if you are interested in specific authors, titles, or subjects.] 

Domestication of Fire

Before hominins learned how create fire, they very carefully preserved the flames of a naturally caused fire by feeding it fuel.  Burning sticks could be taken to other locations and become the source of additional fires.  Folks were extremely careful to preserve the live embers because, if they ever went out, the unlucky brothers and sisters might begin to smell like cat food.

Once upon a time, in an African wilderness, we aren’t sure when, someone figured out how to conjure a dancing flame into being.  Whoa!  In the hominin saga, that first glowing ember was the equivalent of an asteroid strike — a big one.  It catapulted our ancestors outside of the family of life, and into a spooky new realm of supernatural power and danger.  It was the magic ring that gave our ancestors the ability to eventually become the dominant animal on Earth (for a while). 

Unfortunately, the powerful magic was not delivered with warning labels attached.  The gift box did not include powerful herbs and potions to inspire profound wisdom and godlike foresight.  No animal needs these abilities.  Hominins are animals.  The Great Spirit apparently had a mischievous sense of humor.

The four elements are earth, water, air, and fire.  Pyne perceived the first manmade fire to be an act of staggering ecological audacity.  Tropical primates had found the keys to the mastery of fire.  Good grief!  The event is reminiscent of the old Sorcerer’s Apprentice tale, in which a half-clever trainee recklessly conjured a hurricane of big magic that he was powerless to stop, which soon got totally out of control. 

Without domesticated fire, hominins could have remained perfectly sustainable tropical primates, like baboons.  With fire, we acquired an impossible responsibility to use it with flawless wisdom, generation after generation, wherever we went.  The ancestors of baboons effortlessly lived sustainably for several million years by simply living like baboons — brilliant!  When hominins domesticated fire, they lost the magnificent inherent stability that comes from simply being ordinary animals, like all the others.

Some scholars have speculated that if space aliens had visited Earth 100,000 years ago, our ancestors would have appeared to be nothing more than ordinary animals.  For a long time, I accepted that.  Now I don’t.  Those visiting space aliens would have noticed that one species — and only one — maintained fires in their encampments.  This practice was not the slightest bit ordinary.  Hominins were the only animals who could deliberately ignite or extinguish a fire.  By and by, when hominins go extinct, so will domesticated fire, and the monsters it conjured into existence.

Paleoanthropologists and archaeologists have endless screechy arguments about the dates when prehistoric changes happened, like the domestication of fire.  Pretty much, everyone agrees that it happened at least 400,000 years ago, and the most likely suspect was Homo erectus.  Others point to two million year old ashes in the Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa.

The Swartkrans Cave near Johannesburg is a special site.  Many years of assorted stuff has built up on the floor, and the crud has been carefully excavated.  In the oldest layers, no charcoal is found.  It is an era before fire.  At this level, there are complete skeletons of big cats, and the scattered gnawed bones of the critters they ate, including more than 100 individual hominins.  In this era, cats were the top predator.  Higher up, charcoal is found in newer layers, about 1.6 million years ago, the age of fire.  Here are found complete hominin skeletons, and the scattered bones of the critters they gnawed, including big cats — hominins were now the top predator.

Today, a growing number of scientists think it’s time to announce the end of the Holocene Epoch (from 11,700 B.P. to now), and declare the arrival of the embarrassing Anthropocene Epoch.  Epochs are time periods in geologic history that leave behind a layer of residue that is unique and recognizable.  Carboniferous was the coal era.  Jurassic was the era of petroleum and natural gas.  The Anthropocene is the era when humans conquered the Earth, and unwisely initiated massive and irreversible change.

If you ever want to start a bloody fistfight at a bar full of scruffy drunken scientists, ask this: When did the Anthropocene begin?  Some say 1945, the dawn of the nuclear age.  Some say 1800, the kickoff of the Industrial Revolution.  Some say 8000 B.C., the Agricultural Revolution.  Paul Shepard thought that the game changer was the Hunting Revolution, when hominins learned how to make and use deadly stone tipped javelins and lances, hunt in packs like wolves, kill too many large animals, and feed their energy-guzzling oversized brains with highly nutritious grass fed organic meat.  Ronald Wright called this transition “the perfection of hunting,” the first progress trap (a difficult to undo “advance”).

James Scott thought that the good old days ended with the domestication of fire.  In his mind, the nightmare world we live in is the result of four domestications — fire, animals, plants, and humans.  Domesticated fire, like livestock, required breeding, feeding, and oversight to keep it from running away from its master.  Domesticated fire was as addictive as heroin, a habit impossible to willfully quit.  The habit eventually spread around the world.  Carleton Coon noted that only a few folks made it into the nineteenth century without becoming fire makers — the Tasmanians, Andaman Islanders, and the Pygmies of the Ituri forest.

Fire altered the traditional food chain.  Man-eating predators were intimidated by all-night fires and burning torches.  So, fewer hominins were violently killed and eaten.  This diminished a population check on our ancestors, which may have disturbed the stability of functional ecosystems.  Other checks include disease, starvation, conflict, accidents, and so on.  John Reader wrote that, under ideal conditions, if two humans, and their descendants, all had large families, the clan would explode to 4 billion in just 500 years.  Man-eating predators are good for us.  They weed out the sick, elderly, injured, inattentive, and unlucky.  We all feed each other. 

Fire kept our ancestors warmer.  Humans have three million sweat glands to cool us off in hot weather.  In cold weather, the body directs more warm blood to the skin.  One thing that struck Europeans about primitive people was that they seemed to be impervious to cold.  During his famous voyage, Darwin was surprised to observe natives who wore little or no clothing during bitterly cold weather in Tierra del Fuego.

On the Kalahari, night temperatures in June and July can dip below freezing.  Elizabeth Marshall Thomas was with a group of naked San people during a night when their water froze.  Their only protection was a kaross — an animal skin wrapped around their shoulders. 

Tropical people go naked, like chimps and baboons, because clothes are unnecessary, making them requires work, and pointless work is moronic.  Modern consumers waste lots of energy, because much of their sense of “cold” is merely a belief induced by cultural programming.  Also, they want to wear shorts and tee-shirts indoors, in the middle of winter.   I’ve taught myself to be far more tolerant of cooler temperatures than I was 30 years ago.  I wear more layers, and waste far less heat.

Fire enabled folks to survive in regions having extended cold weather.  So they eventually expanded into much of the northern hemisphere, previously home to wooly mammoths, sabertooth cats, and many other species of megafauna.  By making uninhabitable regions habitable, fire increased the global carrying capacity for the hominin hordes — more territory, more food, more hominins.

Fire was used on a large scale to manage landscapes for more productive hunting and foraging.  It was used to drive animals into bogs or streams, off precipices, or into locations where they could be confined and killed.  It burned off cover that concealed hidden nests or burrows.  Flame was used for optimizing grasslands to attract more game — it consumed dead vegetation and woody brush, encouraging the growth of fresh nutritious green forage.  It left behind a banquet of roasted grasshoppers.  It discouraged visits from bloodthirsty flies and mosquitoes.

Fire enabled slash-and-burn agriculture (swidden), which replaced forest with cropland.  Crops were grown for a year or so, until soil fertility was depleted, at which point another area of forest was slashed down.  The depleted fields were left to recover for ten or twenty years, when they were slashed again.  After multiple slash-and-burn cycles, the land was rubbished.  Daniel Hillel reported that in Indonesia there are more than 39.5 million acres (16 million hectares) of land that is incapable of supporting either agriculture or forest.

Fire has long been used as a weapon of mass destruction during violent conflicts.  Cities built of wood often fed the flames of horrific firestorms that claimed many lives.  Even in peacetime, structures heated with open flame fireplaces frequently went up in smoke, often igniting the rest of the village.  For many centuries, firefighting technology was an ineffective process of hauling buckets of water by hand.  Deadly fires were very common, and a great source of fear.  The Christian concept of Hell was intensified by the terror of frequent fires in early times.

Fire had a spiritual aspect in every traditional culture.  Jacob Grimm mentioned the needfire rituals that were once common in many regions of Western Europe.  Every year at the summer solstice, each home in the village let their hearth fire die out.  A new fire was kindled into existence by a spinning drill (never flint and steel), and everyone took home a bit of the needfire to light their hearth for the coming year.  Often people and livestock were passed through the glowing embers for purification and protection.  Fire was highly sacred business.  Many old pantheons had fire gods, goddesses, and myths. 

Domesticated fire is Earth-shaking super-big juju.  James Scott concluded that the accumulated ecological impacts of manmade fire on this planet overwhelm those caused by the domestication of plants and animals.

Cooking

The domestication of fire kicked open the door to a revolutionary change in the hominin saga — a technology called cooking.  Cooking softened and pre-digested food.  Ancestors were able to extract more nutrients from each mouthful.  Better nutrition facilitated the development of bigger brains.  Infants could be weaned sooner when softened food became an option, so births could be spaced closer together.  The toothless elderly benefitted from access to soft food.  Chewing was less work, so hominins evolved smaller teeth compared to other primates.  Also, digestion took less processing, so our guts got smaller, and tummies flatter.

Cooking transformed some foods that had been toxic or indigestible into edible nourishment.  By increasing the variety of plant foods we could eat, and the amount of nutrients we could extract from them, it became possible for an area of land to feed more ancestors.  Thus, cooking boosted an ecosystem’s carrying capacity for hominins.

Cooking gave us the keys to industrial civilization.  Imagine the astonishment when early hominins watched some heavy rocks in the fire turn red and melt into a liquid form.  The first smelter was born.  Metallurgy gave us the ability to fill rivers with spilled blood, to reduce cities to ashes, and to ravage ecosystems in countless, devastating, and irreparable ways.

The ancestors also learned about cooking clay.  They were baking figurines in primitive kilns 25,000 years ago.  This knowledge eventually evolved into baking pottery and bricks.  Sand could be cooked into glass, limestone into cement, wood into charcoal, water into steam, crude oil into distillates (gasoline, diesel, kerosene, etc.), and on and on and on.