From: Grant Callaghan (grantc4@hotmail.com)
Date: Fri 07 Mar 2003 - 22:58:23 GMT
Did all the early peoples have ' fire ' at the same time or did
only one !?
If only one, we can deduct that a than advanced being arose ( he
learned
himself the use of fire) but that doesn 't mean it was
necessarily so !
The find of one single fireplace in some outskirt of Africa can
't be seen
by us that the people who lived there were already more advanced
than
the ones on the neigbouring site where we found nothing.
The picture of the one- step- by- one- step- evolution changes
accor-
dingly to the above, there is nothing that can 't exclude the
possibility
that
the early humankind took ONE big jump ALL together.
Kenneth
I doubt that it was one big jump all together. Fire has been around on
forest and plain a lot longer than people have been around. What seems more
likely to me is that people learned to control fire in increments and
learned to make it in one place first, which then spread the skill to other
places with the advent of trade and travel between tribes.
I see men learning first that a newly burned rabbit or other animal smelled
and tasted better than a dead animal that wasn't burned. Then, I would
imagine they started searching burned areas after a fire to find food that
had been preserved for a while by cooking. Next might have come the idea of
keeping a fire going by adding fuel and throwing dead animals into it. If
they could keep it going through cold days and in sheltered places, this
would lead to developing a hearth and the dressing of a animal before it was
roasted. Taste alone would dictate this development.
So to me, it wasn't discovering fire that was important -- it was the
development of the idea of using fire as a tool in small increments and for
various purposes. Different tribes in different places would have used the
tool of fire in different ways in order to make their lives more
comfortable.
Over time, what was learned and developed by one tribe would have spread to
others as individuals traveled, met and traded with each other. In a hunter
gatherer society, travel was constant as the tribe depleted the resources of
an area and went in search of new ones. Weather also drove them to follow
the herds they fed on to warm climates in the winter and colder ones in the
summer. This constant need for travel would also bring widely separated
tribes together at different seasons to trade stories, goods and ideas.
What was known to one tribe would soon be common knowledge to humans
everywhere, relatively speaking and compared to genetic change.
Grant
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