Stories, phases, and concepts

Origins: from tales to scenarios

The realization that the bond with fire is a peculiar and exclusively human phenomenon has clearly puzzled people in many different cultures and led to the creation of a great variety of myths.

Most myths represent the domestication of fire (as we now call it) as a single adventurous event, with one main character (a god or an animal or both in the same incarnation) who brought this precious gift to humankind. Such stories were no longer included in the sacred books of the three major monotheistic religions. Their disappearance was probably due to the fact that these religions emerged in advanced agrarian or pastoral societies in which fire played a less prominent part than in earlier phases of human history, when gathering and hunting were the main means of subsistence, and the communal fire was the centre of group life.

Still, in some advanced agrarian societies a sense of the importance of control over fire apparently persisted, and continued to find expression in myths. Well-known examples include the myths connected with the Zoroas­ter cult in Iran and, in Europe, the Prometheus myth, which has been recorded in several different versions in ancient Greek and Roman texts.

In Greek and Roman antiquity, some authors tried to go ‘beyond myth­ology' and to describe and explain the origins of the human bond with fire in a more detached, philosophical manner, without attributing the art of controlling fire to the intervention of a semi-divine hero such as Prometheus. The writings of Lucretius in particular reflect a sophisticated theoretical mind, bent on a ‘naturalistic' explanation of how humans came to control fire, but lacking the support of empirical findings.

It was not until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that more solid evidence became available in the emerging fields of palaeontology, archae­ology, and anthropology which seemed to offer the promise of fitting the early history of the human bond with fire into a grand evolutionary theory.^[261] At the same time the physical sciences provided more realistic insight into the nature of fire and fuel.

The current chapter joins this tradition. Written by a sociologist, it aims at a synthesis of empirical knowledge and theoretical reasoning. While, especially with regard to the earliest stages, we have to rely on scenarios and hypotheses, we can still try to keep these as realistic as possible. Rather than viewing the domestication of fire as a single heroic event, I shall regard it as a process of ‘collective learning'.^[262] This approach encompasses and addresses a broad range of academic disciplines. The scope of the subject is truly world historical.

Phases: an overview

There must have been a time when no hominin or human group exercised any control over fire. Then, a time came when some hominin or human groups exercised at least some control over fire. This period of simultaneous co-existence came to an end when ultimately all human groups possessed the ability to control fire.

This sequence of phases or stages may appear trivial and self-evident. But that is only because it is so obviously valid. It can serve as the exemplary model of a far wider range of sequential series. If instead of ‘control over fire' we speak of ‘x', we can make ‘x' stand for, for example, ‘agrarian production' or ‘industrial production'. Again, the same formulations apply: first, there were no human groups with agrarian production, then there were some, and nowadays all human groups at least share in the products of agrarian production - the process of agrarianization has reached the entire world population. The same can be said about the more recent and more rapid process of industrialization that has also passed through the phases of first affecting ‘none', to affecting ‘some', to affecting ‘all' human societies.

The beginning of each new phase marked a transition in human history. A new socio-ecological regime emerged that made human groups more productive and, in confrontations with enemies, more formidable. The for­mation of these regimes contributed to an ongoing process of differentiation in both behaviour and power between humans and all other large animals.

After the first successful attempts at domestication had resulted in the establishment of a lasting fire regime controlled by humans, the world would never be the same again. The balance of power between hominin or human groups armed with fire and all other animals shifted in favour of those equipped with fire. The same applied to the mutual balance of power among proto-human or human groups themselves: those with fire prevailed in the long run over those without fire. Much later, the same pattern was repeated in the long-term processes of agrarianization and industrialization: eventu­ally, even peoples who lived far away from the original centres were, after many generations, faced with the relentless expansion of the stronger agrar­ian and then industrial societies.

As they grew in productivity and power, human groups also became more destructive and more vulnerable. Since fire continued to be a destructive force, increasing control over fire and fuel endowed these groups with a greater potential for destruction - not only intentional destruction directed at enemy groups but also depletion of resources by over-exploitation.

In his fictional film Questfor Fire (1982), Jean-Jacques Annaud dramatically showed how a group of primeval foragers was threatened with death and extinction when it was deprived of its fire and unable to make a new fire. Control over a source of energy makes people more dependent on that which is being controlled and vulnerable to its loss. It seems only logical to assume that when - in the course of agrarianization and industrialization - the networks of control over various sources of energy grew in size and complexity, vulnerability to damage or even collapse of these networks would also increase.

Bearing these general observations in mind, and focusing our attention on the human bond with fire and fuel, we can distinguish four (and, including present trends, perhaps five) successive phases in human history:

1. The phase before domestication, spanning several million years, in the course of which numerous small steps may have been made towards closer ‘association with fire', gradually leading to greater familiarity with burning matter and a commensurate recognition of the value of fuel.^[263]

2. The phase of domestication of fire, beginning perhaps as early as 1.8 million years ago, marked by slowly increasing dependence on fire and appreci­ation of fuel.^[264] The actual domestication of fire constituted a unique feat of collective learning that resulted in control over fire and fuel becoming not just an exclusive but also a universal feature of human group life, shared by all surviving human groups.

3. The phase that in analogy with the subsequent phase of ‘industrialization' may be called agrarianization^[265] During this phase, starting somewhere between 15,000 and 10,000 years ago, dependence upon fire and fuel continued to be strong, and even continued to increase, but the major changes in human societies were related to the production and distribu­tion of food rather than to innovations in the use of fire and fuel.^[266]

4. Industrialization: the trend that became dominant in the middle of the nineteenth century, as a cascade of innovations in the exploitation of the fossil fuels coal, oil, and natural gas brought about rapid changes in virtually every aspect of social life all over the world.^[267]

5. We are now perhaps witnessing the dawn of a new phase, in which fire and fuel will play a very different role than in the still current phase of industrialization. We do not seem yet to have reached the point at which we can identify the nature of the transition and give it a satisfactory label.

Leading concepts: matter, energy, information

The history of the human bond with fire and fuel has aspects that relate to practically all academic disciplines, in the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences. In order to keep my account as coherent and consistent as possible I shall use three related concepts, each only vaguely definable, but together forming what I hope to be a comprehensible and enlightening conceptual triangle: Matter, Energy, and Information (MEI).

‘Matter' refers to the general category of all objects, large and small, in the material world that are visible and tangible or otherwise observable - from sand and rocks to animals and artefacts. Many material objects appear at first sight to be static, unmoving, unchangeable, but at closer inspection the static impression will turn out to be misleading: as Heraclitus already noted, everything that ‘is', is in movement, is not immutable but changing. Nothing in the whole world has always been in the same shape, at the same spot, forever.

‘Energy', as noted by the physical scientist Frank Niele, is the general term indicating the forces that cause change.^[268] Fire is a manifestation of energy, fuel is a source of energy. Another familiar form of energy is wind - a force that causes movement in objects that appear otherwise motionless, as the branches of a tree when the wind is still.

But even on a windless day, there is movement in trees. Other organisms are leading busy lives on the bark; and the trees themselves are continuously undergoing processes of growth and decay of cells, losing leaves and growing new ones. These processes are not, like the wind, ‘dead' - they are expres­sions of life.

According to current scientific insight, wind as well as life derive their driving force, their energy, from the same source - sunlight. Both wind and life are transformations of solar activity into earthly energy that causes movement and change in matter.

‘Information', the third angle in our conceptual triangle, is the general term we can use to deal with the problem of what it is that gives direction and shape to the multiple processes occurring in the combinations of matter and energy. Neither wind nor life occur haphazardly. The general heading of ‘information' draws attention to the particular direction the wind takes, and to the seemingly endless variation of forms in which life manifests itself.

Applying the concept of information to fire may seem puzzling. It seems to flout common sense to imagine that fire, when it first began to ravage forests between 400 and 500 million years ago, was guided by ‘information'. Fire seems almost prototypical of a wild natural force, blind and undirected. Nevertheless, it is not unreasonable to assume that, from the very start, there were patterns in burning, as there are patterns in life, no matter how bizarre. And the idea that fire is structured by information has become more plausible in the history of the past ι million years, when the fre­quency and variety of fires have become more directed by humans, and thus submitted to ever higher degrees of control, which would have been impossible without being informed by collective learning.

In other words, as long as we are unaware of any specific patterns that might possibly explain the occurrences of ignition, we are inclined to speak of ‘wild' or ‘blind' natural forces. But when ignition is largely controlled and predictable, it makes perfect sense to say that it is subject to ‘information'.