Erin Allman-Updike

Like it is absolutely the truth.

I mean, sure, there may have been some hot springs accidents or severe sunburns, lightning strikes, wildfires, maybe that caught up with early humans.

And in this, we're no different than the other animals that have suffered the same fate for the 400 million years that fire has been possible on this planet.

Whoa.

It wasn't possible before then.

Because no oxygen or why?

Oxygen and land plants.

Okay.

Okay.

Really fascinating.

Yeah.

But it's the domestication of fire that sets us apart.

Controlling and creating fire, making fire, gave us warmth.

It protected us from predators.

It provided a means of cooking, giving us access to higher quality and more easily digestible foods, which provided the energy needed to fuel bigger brains.

It helped us to make tools, weapons and ceramics.

Fire is a fundamental, essential step in hominin evolution, second in importance only to language, which may have been encouraged by fire.

Without fire, we would not have developed into the humans that we are today.

At all.

Burns are a consequence of fire domestication for the large part.