Did the first fire users keep a fire (flame and all) constantly
burning to preserve fire?

Hello logicchopper~

The answer to your question is ?probably.? 

The fact of the matter is that we don?t have a definitive answer,
because we don?t have absolutely clear documentation about when
mankind first began to control fire.

Nonetheless, common sense tells us that yes, early man probably did
keep a continuous fire, carrying it with him from place to place,
after he managed to ?capture? the fire from some natural source.

?Early hominids undoubtedly encountered naturally occurring fires
often, from lightening, volcanic eruptions, and the igniting of dry,
dense underbrush. How then was this natural phenomenon captured and
tamed for domestic use? ?there is a theory to explain how this
happened. It probably all began when somebody brought a lit branch
from a natural fire back to the campsite. Such an acquisition had to
be carefully maintained for if it went out there was no known way to
start it glowing again. For this reason, hearths were closely watched
day and night?It is not implausible to believe that early hominids
carried lit branches with them when they moved from place to place.
Such a practice is still followed by Pygmy groups today.? (?Fire,?
Virtual Classroom : http://www.virtualclassroom.net/tvc/internet/fire.htm
)

Also see this University of Chicago PDF, which indicated that early
humans kept their fires burning continuously in a container.
http://hominid.uchicago.edu/cmalcom/F03HOLec20ppt.pdf

The first known evidence of controlled fire can be found in China, c.
500 000 years ago. Evidence for earlier use of controlled fire in
inconclusive, according to experts. (?The Human Story,? Inside
Science: http://www.fortunecity.com/emachines/e11/86/human.html )

Regards,
Kriswrite

RESEARCH STRATEGY:
fire "early man"
://www.google.com/search?q=fire+%22early+man%22&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&c2coff=1&start=30&sa=N

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Request for Answer Clarification by logicchopper-ga on 23 Jun 2004 15:32 PDT

Hi.  I think I might have accedently hit "Cancel Request" by mistake,
so I?m going to re-send a shorter version of a previous post.  You
have my apologies if this is a repeat.

1. The first link you provide only says that fire was *transported*
from location to location by a torch, not that it was *preserved* in
situ that way.  That?s why I specified ?flame and all? in my question
about the *preservation* of fire.

2. The second link, though it does actually address the *preservation*
issue, does not address the *manner* of preservation.  In particular,
it does not say anything one way or the other about whether fire was
preserved ?flame and all? or whether, as is known to have been the
case very early, only the embers were preserved in heaps.

3. Technically, the second link (slide 15) warrants an answer of No,
not your answer of ?probably,? since my question was explicitly about
?the first fire users? and slide 15 at that link says the first users
were ?opportunistic? and ?controlled use? only came later.

4. You base your answer in part on ?common sense?.  A. That?s not what
I pay for in web-based research.  B. Common Sense also suggests the
contrary, since a constantly burning fire would require much more fuel
and thus further tax the already survival-oriented hominid.  Common
Sense actually supports the ember-preservation hypothesis, since it
would be easy even for a hominid to discover that smoldering embers
will ignite fresh fuel, and the benefits of not having to constantly
stockpile and consume fuel would be obvious even to a hominid.

---

Clarification of Answer by kriswrite-ga on 23 Jun 2004 16:46 PDT

logicchopper~

I'm sorry you were dissatisfied with the Answer. Unfortunately, all
that experts have to go on is "common sense" or "hunches." This is not
my opinion, but the opinion of anthropologists and archeologists. Any
further information on how the fire was preserved would also be a
matter of educated guesses.

Nonetheless, please feel free to contact the editors and request a
refund. If you're unsure how to do this, please check out Google
Answers: Help & Tips: http://www.answers.google.com/answers/help.html

Kriswrite

As an anthropologist and archaeologist, the answer Kriswrite-ga gave
is about as detailed and accurate as we can get without "inventing" an
answer.

Section number 4 of your response is also nothing more than guesswork
and what you call "common sense" after you criticize Kriswrite about
using 'common sense.'

The only thing anthropologists, palentologists and archaeologists have
to go on when defining early fire use is the remnants of the fire
itself.  What actions took place with it or around it are pure
conjecture.

Nobody can give you a definitive answer, only an educated guess.

If kriswrite were in my archaeology 101 class, she gets an A.

Digsalot

We can answer this question with a fair degree of certainty by
observing tribes who still depend on maintaining fire today.

I spent some time in the 1980's in remote mountains of Papua New
Guinea, where the stone age is (to a large extent) still happening.
The women still scrape the food from the SakSak (Sago Palm) with a
sharp stone bound to a stick with twine, and the men hunt for birds
with a bamboo bow and arrow.

These tribes were discovered by the west in the 1900's, but due to
their remoteness their life has not yet been greatly changed. In the
PNG mountains in the 1980's we saw a few western implements such as
bush knives, but nothing like a box of matches.

When transporting fire (on a hunting or fishing expedition), the men
would carry a chunk or hardwood about a meter long which had glowing
coals at one end. Every few minutes, as the coals dimmed, they would
swish the log through the air to keep it going. They did this almost
as an automatic reflex, and could reliably keep the coals glowing
throughout the day - even during the regular daily tropical downpour.

In the village, fire was used for warmth and to cook the local sweet
potato (and occasionally pig meat). At the end of the evening the fire
was allowed to die down naturally, and the next day there were always
enough glowing embers under the ashes, even if there had been rain in
the meantime. I attribute this to the good hardwoods available in the
area.

[Aside: in my bushwalking days in Australia, we could achieve the same
result with the more solid woods such as Ironbark, although with the
softer more common varieties of Eucalyptus it was necessary to rake
some ashes over the dying fire to reliably preserve enough embers to
start the fire the next day without matches.]

It's clearly not necessary to preserve flame in order to preserve
fire. So why would any tribe do so, when that would require many times
more wood to be gathered? There's no common-sense reason to keep the
flame going.

Also bear in mind that once a village had fire, they would have
multiple fires. Because fire can be spread so easily, there would be
no reason to have just one village fire. So it would be no big deal if
some fires went out completely - you would just get some coals or a
flame from another of the fires.

As digsalot-ga says, we can't answer authoritatively about the FIRST
fire users - but I'm happy to "infer" the answer from the copious
evidence provided by later fire users.

Regards,
eiffel-ga

The contrast between Digsalot and Eiffel is golden.  Digsalot shows an
inability to follow a logical train of thought by acting as if I
criticize the use of common sense in science as such!  My point, as I
clearly state, is that one doesn?t hire a *researcher* to recount the
dictates of common sense, I can take care of that myself.  What I want
from a *researcher* is DATA that has EVIDENTIAL BEARING on the
question.  This was in fact provided by Eiffel?who I would be glad to
pay, having given more the sort of answer I expected.  Digsalot says
that forensic science on this subject is reduced to (in his words)
?pure conjecture? (why would I pay for that anyway?).  On the other
hand, Eiffel gives a great example of how forensic scientists can
reach reasonable conclusions by making rational inferences from extant
data.  Bravo Eiffel!

My two cents... logicchopper-ga asks "Did the first fire users keep a
fire (flame and all) constantly burning to preserve fire?"

New archaeological evidence indicates that man had developed the
technology to control fire (presumably including transportation as
well as in situ preservation) by 790,000 BC, much further back than
the Chinese site mentioned by kriswrite-ga:

[Scientists trace ancient signs of fire's use]
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4863378/

"Researchers work at an excavation site at Gesher Benot Ya'aqov in
Israel. Among the artifacts discovered there were remains of burned
wood, tiny flint pieces, bones with cut marks and a variety of
grains."

This pushes the timeline, but in fact:

"There are earlier sites associating fire with early humans in Africa,
though some researchers believe the evidence at those locations is
ambiguous and natural fires cannot be ruled out."

So, rightly or wrongly, the "common sense" viewpoint is that the
earliest use of fire by humans was opportunistic.  It is natural to
think that at some point a human might have deliberately added fuel to
a blaze started by Mother Nature, but the question here is whether
that would have been the "first" use of fire.

For a discussion of the spectrum of evidence and opinion prior to the
recent discovery in Israel, see here:

[When was fire first controlled by human beings?]
http://www.beyondveg.com/nicholson-w/hb/hb-interview2c.shtml

"The earliest evidence for control of fire by humans, in the form of
fires at Swartkrans, South Africa and at Chesowanja, in Kenya,
suggests that it may possibly have been in use there as early as about
1.4 or 1.5 million years ago... [with] critics saying these fires
could have been wildfires instead of human-made fires.  They suggest
the evidence for human control of fire might be a misreading of other
factors, such as magnesium-staining of soils, which can mimic the
results of fire if not specifically accounted for. For indisputable
evidence of fire intentionally set and controlled by humans, the
presence of a hearth or circle of scorched stones is often demanded as
conclusive proof, and at these early sites, the evidence tying the
fires to human control is based on other factors."

Speculation about how early humans might have used natural wildfires
can be based on observations of how other opportunistic species
respond to it.  If such responses as warming oneself count, then
personally I should have to answer "No" to logicchopper-ga's question.

regards, mathtalk-ga