When we think of what made human beings into human beings, one of the first things we come up with is the discovery of fire.

The control of news of fire is one of the earliest things which our ancestors did, which separated us from other apes, and began us on the path to becoming

modern podcast listening human beings.

Learn more about how humans came to use fire on this episode of Everything Everywhere

Daily.

This episode is sponsored by audible.com.

The audio book which I would highly recommend on the subject of fire and early humans

is catching fire, how cooking made us human by Richard Wangram.

In the book, Wangram makes the argument that it was cooking food over a fire which actually made us human.

Cooking allowed humans to evolve larger brains and

smaller guts because fire allowed us to perform digestive functions outside of our

bodies. You can get a free one month trial to audible and two free audio books by going to audible trial

dot com slash everything everywhere or by clicking on the link in the show notes.

Before we start there are a few things that need to be clarified. First is that humans didn't discover fire any more than we discovered rocks and trees. Fire was around before humans, so the discovery of

fire would probably just have been whoever we defined to be the first human being. There was no

first caveman who had a Eureka moment when fire was discovered.

What we are really interested in are questions about when people began to use fire, harness

fire, and eventually create fire. Second is that when we go back this far in time,

the evidence becomes very sketchy.

Organic objects don't tend to preserve very well,

and the odds that any living thing should be preserved as a fossil is very, very rare.

Much of what we know is based on creating a narrative that fits the available facts and the facts

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