Fireside - Jenny Owen Youngs, John Mark Nelson, Tancred (mp3)

Every day we’re losing light / Gather round the fireside

People have been gathering round the fireside since before our species existed. Shuffling towards the warmer air, smoke-smells gathering on hair, feeling calmed by the mesmerizing flicker of the flames.

The first firesides would not have been our own; like cheetahs, chimpanzees, and “fire follower” birds, ancient hominids likely foraged freshly-cooked meat from wildfires.

Homo erectus were the first to have a hearth. Around 1 million years ago, grasses were burned too deep in a South African cave to have been swept there by a wildfire. We’ve found a 700,000-year-old hearth filled with a deep layer of ash studded with burnt flints. We think Homo erectus did not know how to start the fire, only how to conserve one. At those oldest sites, we’ve found no trace of pyrite or any other firestarters, suggesting that the fire was lit from carefully-kept wildfire embers. (This seems to be the going theory, but I’ll admit I’m not fully persuaded. Wooden hand drills decay a lot faster than chipped stones, making the absence of evidence rather unconvincing evidence of absence.)

Until a week ago, our earliest evidence of fire-making was from 50,000-year-old sites in France. We know Neanderthals could produce birch tar to connect stone spearheads to wooden shafts, and this requires several hours of very high temperatures, which it seems like you wouldn’t reach in your technology tree without being able to start a fire on demand. Now we think that started longer ago; on December 10, a new study came out describing a 400,000-year-old hearth containing a few pyrite flakes. That kind of mineral isn’t found in that region, so, the reasoning goes, the pyrite must have been brought there intentionally by Neanderthals looking to ignite a fire.

We really know so little about the fire culture at that time. Many of the paleolithic sites we’ve excavated show little evidence of fire, but the absence of archaeological traces might just mean that fires were built in an ad hoc way around camps, rather than being maintained in a consistent hearth that would leave a clear signature of layered ash. In fact, you might be more likely to rebuild fires in new places, instead of carefully guarding a central hearth, if you can easily start them.

I’m personally very grateful to live in an era of abundant light and warmth, so abundant that fire is a somewhat antiquated technology for delivering either. I went to a wedding recently where the bride and groom each carried a candle over to an oil lantern, igniting a “union flame” that burned for the rest of the reception (and maybe longer, I believe they carried the lantern home with them). You have to appreciate the primal / promethean aesthetic, which wouldn’t emanate as strongly from an LED. Perhaps it should! But the older miracles have had longer to ingratiate themselves into our inborn instinct for beauty.

Only a few more days of boreal loss of light,
- Tessa