The History of Fire

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I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too.

“We're on fire with yet another fire episode of "Step You Should Know"”

about fire. Yeah, so Jerry passed me when you left the room. To surprise you, he had done one on fire and I said, "Well, we did years ago and just sort of more than nuts and bolts in the science of the actual thing that is fire."

Right. But I commissioned this one from Dave. I believe that's a little more along the lines of like, what did it mean for people and like kind of win? You know, I wondered, like, did we learn how to make fire?

Was there like a day that that happened and do we know that day?

And that person and the answer is no.

Unfortunately, we don't know. We not only don't know that our, also our technology will almost certainly never be so advanced that we will ever find out. No. And one of the reasons why is because they're,

they're probably was multiple people, different times around the world who learned how to manipulate fire. And also, there wasn't just like a one day where fire didn't exist and then all of a sudden somebody like strikes a flint and some shirt or something like that.

And now there's fire. It happened in stages, humans interactions with fire. And luckily for us, even though there isn't one day that this happened, and we can't say like, it was Todd. Todd was the one who invented fire.

It is a very fascinating subject. It's definitely up my alley. Yeah, and it may have also not been linear. We may have had control the fire for a while and then not for a while. Yeah.

So basically what everyone agrees on scientifically is that the discovery of fire was not an incident, but it was a process. Right. And the traditional story goes that Prometheus went on a quest for fire, ended up hooking up essentially with a human woman,

and found that humans were way better than his own species. That's right. And we got fire from that. That's right. So we talked a little bit about fire in how much we needed.

I remember saying that I saw somewhere that we're obligated fire users, that we essentially needed it to survive.

“And that raised the question like, do we still need it?”

And the answer is yes, we use it still today.

But the role that it played in human development is just staggering. Like just the idea of cooking alone is like just that revolutionary change. And all of the stuff that that unlocked for us, nutrient-wise, taste-wise, it's not forget about taste. But then also like we made metals with it.

We made pottery with it. We kept animals at bay with it. Even mosquitoes, they don't like fires. We learned to do all these different things to interact and manipulate our world using fire.

So the idea of not having fire is just terrifying. Yeah, for sure.

There are theories that human language was born around the campfire,

“because now people were awake and needed something to do,”

when they sat around the fire, like talk about what they did that day. And obviously fires would eventually power the fires that made steam possible, and steam engines possible, and birth the industrial revolution. So fire, very important.

It's a technology which basically blew early humans' minds.

Obviously they didn't learn how to make fire at first. And we're going to go through these stages. Like the first fire came from a lightning strike. But even that probably blew the minds of whatever was walking around back then and saw the ground on fire all of a sudden.

Yeah, what I found fascinating though is the idea that fire is actually fairly new to earth. You know, like earth was a watery planet for billions of years. And it wasn't until the atmosphere kind of congealed into its oxygen-ish state

“like it is now, and that vegetation grew, and then you started to have lightning strikes too.”

You put all those three things together. Now you've got fire, and it didn't exist before on earth. That was not something I've ever really thought of before. I thought that was pretty cool. Yeah, I think they said the earth has been kind of fire ideal for about 470 million years,

which is certainly a long time, but not on the order of billions and billions of years.

If you go forward and time a bit to about 6 million years ago, that's when the first

hominums appeared in Africa. So now all of a sudden you have the conditions for fire, and you have, you know, I want to say people, has that even correct? Hominums are people, yeah? Okay, I just don't even know what people means.

Hominums are people too, Chuck. That's what I think. All of a sudden you had people that could eventually harness fire and then learn to make fire, or the very least, realize the benefits and take great interest in fire. Yeah, they think actually it's probable.

“So the best way to kind of look back in this kind of prehistory where there's not only no written”

record or even an oral tradition, like there's no archeological evidence at this point yet still even, right? So it's all just complete conjecture, but a pretty good way to kind of approach the whole thing is to say, okay, how do animals interact with fire? Right, because those first hominins were pretty close to the great ape ancestors we evolved from

still. So you can make a pretty good case that they would have interacted with fire like other animals do it, animals basically run away from it, they ignore it, depending on whether it's a third or not, and then some of them actually use it to their advantage, like raptors have been seen picking up burning sticks and dropping them elsewhere to flush out prey and quarry, essentially,

which is a jerk move, but it works. Yeah, for sure. And if there was ever any kind of wildfire that started because of a lightning strike, right behind that, you would see predators like wolves or even some birds, either praying on the animals as they flee or just having a better hunting ground because

things were now kind of burned down and you could see everything. Right, so you can make a pretty good case that early, early, early humans would have essentially been doing the same thing that we would have eventually figured out that fire offers things that non-firey things don't like, for example, we probably started foraging was the first step, where after a wildfire, we might have been looking for things to eat and been like,

this tastes way better than when I catch it and pull it's head off and then start eating. Whatever's happening here, this fire is doing something great to this. Yeah, I mean, the idea of accidental cooked meat must have just been mind blowing. Yeah, you know. I mean, a rare steak is a thing of beauty in and of itself, but yeah, I don't want to say well

done, but yes, cooked meat is good too. A cooked turkey leg is way better than a raw turkey leg.

Yeah, hey, I never tested that theory, but I bet you're right.

That's one of the things that you don't even have to try yourself. You just innately know it. And it's from this era. Yeah, that's right. Gathering after foraging was the next step of sort of the discovery of fire. And that's when humans would like hey, I have this fire, it may have happened by lightning strike, but I now have it in a little, a little bindle in my hand and I can, or maybe in a log hollow

and I can carry this thing from one place to another now, or maybe it's just a tree branch. If you're a little bit more of a simpleton, like took took was, and now you can transport your fire from one area to the other and you can use that fire to flush prey out or to protect yourself from

Yeah, that's, that's a big one that I hadn't really thought of before, but you keep animals at bay because animals are used to wildfires and not going near them. So if you're a human or a hominin and you're huddling around the fire, the savor to tiger probably isn't going to come attack you right then.

You never saw jungle meat?

“Oh, very, very long ago. And all I remember is blue doing his thing.”

Yeah, the bare necessities. Yeah, it's so great. Still probably my favorite, uh, even among the moderns, my favorite Disney cartoon. My favorite, it's long been Robin Hood. That was always my favorite as a kid. Yeah, I like that Robin Hood lot, but you just can't be, there's so many bangers in the jungle book.

Okay. All right. All right. I'll go with that one. Then I'll just, I'll throw out my own personal favorite and in favor of yours. Oh, why would you do that? I just, I just want to get along. Oh, okay. All right. So they're carrying fire around at this point.

They may have discovered like a way to actually keep it going better, like I know on the survival shows, uh, like a lone animal dung is a great, very sort of slow burning way to transport fuel, like a burning cow pie, maybe. Yeah, for sure. So that's the gathering thing. So we go from forging, like we have no control over, we just identify that it's something special to being able to move it around and keep it going.

That's the key. Thanks to the animal dung discovery, the cow pie. And then we finally reach the point. And this is where all of the archaeologists and anthropologists and all theologists want to kind of pinpoint when did humans start making fire ourselves? And we do have evidence of

humans using fire very far back more than a million years ago. But for hundreds of thousands and

hundreds of thousands of years between that point and where we are unambiguously making fire ourselves, there's a lot of room for interpretation. Yeah. Yes, we were cooking or something or we were using a fire. It's clear that there were humans around this fire, but it's not clear that humans actually made the fire. We may have gathered it. When did we start making fire? That's the big question in archaeology and anthropology. That's right. Boy, it sounds like I know it's early,

but it sounds like a perfect place for a little cliffhanger's break. What I do. All right, we'll be right back everybody. You know Roldaul, the writer who thought I'd bully Wonka, Matilda and the BFG. But did you know he was also a spy? Was this before he wrote his stories I'd must have been. Our new podcast series, the secret world of Roldaul is a wild journey

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"Presented by Capital One, Founding Partner of iHeart-Climbing Sports." I became a millionaire overnight

“but lost everything that actually mattered. Wait a minute, Sophia, did you just say he lost everything?”

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“giving my money away." Hold on, Sophia, so the girl he wants to marry is already sending money out”

the door. And that's just the beginning. He makes a plan, sets up a trust, and finally thinks he has everything under control. Okay, so things work out then? Let's just say the people he trusted the most are the ones who ended up shocking him the most to just the money end up being worth going through all that. "To find out, listen to the okay story-time podcast on the iHeart-Radywap, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts." All right, we're back. We don't have a definitive answer,

unfortunately. But again, we have a lot of good ideas. As far as those three stages go, they do get a little bit easier to pinpoint a rough timeline, but that foraging stage that we mentioned it first is that's definitely the hardest to kind of lock down in time. There is no archeological

“record basically during that phase. But they do think, and again, this is people just giving”

their best guess, they do think that Australopitheasines, the early humans, may have been foraging

around fires, and this is like four million years ago? Yeah, for sure. I didn't see why they thought

that, but like what the Australopitheas was doing that made them think that, but I don't know, maybe it had to do with their other behavior that made it seem like they would have done that. So the gathering phase, like I said, that dates back to about a million years ago, where it's very clear that humans had a fire somewhere, that's not possible that like a lightning strike set off a fire in the areas where we found evidence of human habitation and fire together,

say a hundred feet from the mouth of a cave, very difficult for a wildfire to start there.

“So this unambiguous is what they call like evidence that humans were interacting or using fire,”

putting fire to some controlled use at that point, but it's far from clear whether they actually

started that and almost certainly did not a million years ago. Yeah, and that can also be a little

tricky because sometimes they can few stuff stuff that might look like charcoal or ash is some naturally occurring sediment from a cave. Yeah. So they tried to kind of parse through that stuff over the years, but they have found sites like there's one, and we're going to go through a few of these in a minute, but one called the Wonder Work Cave in South Africa that they basically have agreed is probably the oldest site of controlled on purpose fire use because they have found

burnt bones there and this is 100 feet into a cave. Right, that's again unambiguous use of human fire. There's also some contenders for when we started controlled, like making fire ourselves, starting fires. And one is about 780,000 years ago, 400,000 years seems to be the generally accepted latest date that humans became capable in a widespread fashion of making fire ourselves. So somewhere

between a million and 400,000 years ago humans became capable of making fire starting fires.

And I say we talk about some of these different locations that are contenders for all this stuff. Well, yeah, there's the one in South Africa that I just mentioned. They have found and been able to date ash from that cave to about a million years ago. But again, we're not positive that that was ignited by humans or not, and they don't know exactly how the fires were used in that case. But it gets a little better as we move along. The KSM cave in Israel was discovered about 26 years

ago, and that is near Tel Aviv. And this is where they have found the first fireplace, basically, the first heart, the dates to about 300,000 years. So that's that's pretty unambiguous. Yeah. And one of the reasons why they're like, "Yes, this is a pit because up to that point when they find like use of fire, it's just like kind of spread out. Maybe one fire was held there. This is like layer after layer after layer of fires in the same place." So that's

clearly a heart. Yeah. There's another one in Israel, called Gesher Benat Yakov. It's in northern Israel. And this is the one where they think that people were potentially starting fires, as far back as 780,000 years ago. And this would have been homo erectus who was the longest

first ones to basically take a leap forward in stone-tool technology. They also invented George S. Jeans.

“And they know that the homo erectus were the ones who were making, or at least using this fire”

780,000 years ago, because they found their characteristics stone tools like hand axes. And they were cooking fish essentially here on the banks of the Jordan River, carte that were up to like 6.5 feet from what I read. And Chuck, I was reading about how they figured out that they were definitely cooking fish and that they weren't just like fish remains, that they'd eaten raw and tossed into a fire. And they tested the fish teeth that had been cooked

to see what temperature they'd been exposed to. If there were a high temperature, they probably would have been remains just chucked into the middle of a fire. If there were exposed to a lower temperature, then this probably would have been a controlled roast. And they found the evidence for roasting, so they were cooking fish about 800,000 years ago there. Yeah, the next one is the rising star cave in South Africa, a very promising cave.

And this one is a little controversial in that they do think that some sort of tiny brain species of early human. They were called the homo-naledi. They think that they built fires in this cave. And this was about 335,000 years ago. But other people came along and said, "No, I'm not sure if that's when it happened, it might have been other people that came to that cave later." And the similar kind of goes for another cave in China, the Zukodian cave.

That one was excavated in the 1920s and people thought for a long, long time that like, "Hey,

here's the oldest harth, the oldest sort of purposeful fireplace." And it goes back a half a million

years. But it's kind of gone back in four cents in the 1990s, 1990s, that is, they saw evidence of this ash there. And they said, "You know, I don't think this is ash, actually." It was what Chuck will talk about later as other organic materials that look like ash. But then later on in the 2010s, other people came back and had other evidence.

“They said, "No, I think they were purpose-built fires here." Which, you know, just goes to show”

kind of how hard it is to really pinpoint the stuff. Right. Yeah, going back and forth between the 1920s and the 2010s like that, that's like archeological whiplash. Yeah. So we really need to just kind of also point out here. We're talking about how menins using fire, not homo sapiens. Homo sapiens obviously knew how to use fire and how to make fire. But we almost certainly were not the ones that came up with fire ourselves.

We might have learned it actually from some of the other species of humans that were running around at the same time as we were like Neanderthals. And like I said, there was evidence of like other species like homo erectus using fire to one degree or another. As far as like maybe a

million years ago. But there's a lot of questions about, "Did every single species of human know

how to make fire?" And Neanderthals, in particular, have been kind of picked on as not necessarily knowing what they were doing with starting fires? Yeah, this one has a pretty good argument,

“going I think in both directions. They found evidence of activity in France and like sites and”

France that they excavated. Yeah. And they, you know, what they found was that were more traces of fire from periods without glaciers than periods that did have glaciers. And it doesn't really track in some ways because you would think that they would, if they could make fire on their own and they would have done that when it was colder. And also it makes sense in a way because in the period where there aren't glaciers, there're going to be more lightning strikes and thunderstorms.

And the vegetation's going to be dried out so they may be, you know, using the fire even in the warmer periods because it's just there. Right, exactly. They also found lots or they have found in some Neanderthal sites. Lots of ash build up and not necessarily because this is a very ancient heart but because they had to keep the fire going. So it was constantly going because they didn't know how to get it started again if it went out. So yeah, those are pretty good arguments

for Neanderthals not being able to make fire. But there are other people who point to other evidence that says like, no, actually Neanderthals knew what they were doing. One of them is that Neanderthals made birch bark pitch which they used as basically an adhesive. Like thousands of years before homo sapiens were doing that and that they're also frequently found with Manganese dioxide chunks as black mineral and it was usually interpreted as they were using

actually Manganese dioxide is a major component in fireworks and you could use it as a pretty

“good fire starter. So the the jury's out but for my money they probably did know how to start fires”

because homo sapiens have a very very long tradition of underestimating theanderthals and being paying along in the end as the science advances. Yeah, for sure. And while we don't know, you know, when all this started, we definitely know the how and it's kind of how modern humans start primitive fires like without any sort of sort of man-made tools. Percussion methods is, you know, when you're striking that flint off of, you know, each other, like off of a rock, it's going to

spark and, you know, maybe they saw that and thought, hey, that looks a little bit like lightning. And gave it a shot. You've got the old fire drill method or any kind of friction method of rubbing something together really, really fast and that'll, that'll get a fire going if you're good. Yeah, one, I've heard of both of those obviously, but fire pistons, I had not heard of, essentially you take a tube and a piston and put together their, they essentially form an airtight

well coupling, I guess. You put a little bit of tinder really, really dry almost powdery or fibrous, like easily combustible material, right? And you put the piston in the tube and you press it really quickly and that compression of air heats the air just enough that it can actually ignite that tinder and you use the tinder to catch more tinder on fire and now you've got a fire started. Like when you look back at some of this stuff, I was watching a video of using

bow drills to create fire. I looked, I was watching a really neat video. There's a YouTube channel called Make it Primitive and they were making birch pitch with no pots. And when you look at this stuff, they're recreating that very, very ancient people figured out how to do. It's like, how did anyone ever accidentally stumble upon this? Like, I understand we're looking at like the developed endpoint version of this primitive technology, but I can't even imagine how somebody

figured out how to make birch pitch in the first place. What happened in some random fire somewhere that gave somebody the idea to turn that into making pitch? Yeah, I mean, I think it's kind of cool, like, um, I don't know, maybe someone wrote their hands together and I got hot and they were like, huh, friction causes heat and you know, maybe a thousand years later that idea became maybe a lot of friction could call so much heat that something might actually catch on fire. And then they

“start looking around on like a good way to do that. Like that's how it had to have happened.”

I just think it's amazing. Yeah, there was probably a transition period that were some

push-most hands were bleeding. They rub them raw so much trying to start a fire with them before they moved on to wood. Yeah, I mean, what I think is amazing is that there's really nothing new on the scene, you know? Well, they say there's nothing new under the sun chuck. I guess so. Do you want to take our second break and come back and talk, I don't know about the history of fire? Yeah, let's do it. You know Roll Doll, the writer who thought I'd Willy Wonka, Matilda and the BFG. But did you

know he was also a spy? Was this before he wrote his stories? I'd must have been. Our new podcast series, the secret world of Roll Doll is a wild journey through the hidden chapters of his extraordinary

controversial life. His job was literally to seduce the wives of powerful Americans and he was

really good at it. You probably won't believe it either. Okay, I don't think that's true.

“I'm telling you, because that was a spy. Did you know dog got cozy with the Roosevelt's?”

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radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. March Madness is here and if you're trying to keep up with everything happening on and off the court, we've got you covered on the podcast, Blagrant and Funny. You look at the top four number one seeds. What do you think UCLA is going to do? Break down that for me, my friend. I do think UCLA has a really good chance of getting back to the final four. Obviously, you kind is the overwhelming favorite in this tournament, but I be honest,

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Wait a minute, Sophia, did you just say he lost everything? That's right. It's an eriting too much drama week on the okay story time podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, "I just inherited a fortune after losing my mom and now my girlfriend's entire family is coming out of nowhere with their hands up. One sibling wants me to fund their whole lifestyle.

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So kind of at the outset, we're talking a little bit about how fire just changed humanity, and there's some specific things that we used it for that helped advance different species, not just homosapiens along. One is heat, like there's the pretty widely believed consent, this is that we could not, and we did not move into colder climates, not just homosapiens, but all hominins until we had at least figured out how to move fire from one place to another without

it going out. That we just would not have been able to survive in northern latitudes without fire. So that was a huge thing. It allowed us to spread further and further away from the tropics. Yeah, for sure. And once you got out of the tropics that allowed you to spread further and further wherever you were, because it provided light, you could explore those caves, you could explore the darkness of the world around you. I know I've said this before about camping,

and when I go to the family camp, sometimes we'll take people that have a versions to camping, and we have some solar power there in string lights that light up the camp at night, and I have learned

“first hand that what I think is going on when people say they don't like camping is that they don't”

like the darkness once you leave that campfire, because people that say they don't like camping about a great time at the family camp, because it's lit up all around you, and they've said

"Man, I feel it is here, and I'm never at ease in the woods, I'm like this because you can see around

you, it's the dark you're afraid of, or whatever you think is in the dark." I feel like you're talking about Hodgeman right now, aren't you? You know, Hodgeman had a great time at the camp. Oh, I'm sure he did, Hodgeman has a good time wherever he goes, but I can also, he's a city boy. Yeah. Yeah, I let him sleep in my little, my little camper, the little boy, bed camper. Yeah, we snuggle up. That is very sweet, and completely unsurprising. Yeah,

it was sweet, it was a good snug. And we also made tools, John and I did, with our fire, which is something that the early humans did. So I'm a real birch bark pitch fan now. That's like it, yeah. This is what it's for. So it's a, it's a, it's a tarry adhesive that you make by basically burning

and condensing birch bark. Okay, which I love birch trees in the first place.

Panda was almost a birch. It's a quicking aspect, but they're close. They're similar. I just love that bark. Yeah. So if you just, again, go watch a make it primitive, and the way that they make birch bark pitch. But you, you take this stuff, this tarry stuff. And you say take a arrow. There's an arrowhead in your right hand. There's a shaft in your left hand. There's a string of twine in your teeth, because both of your other hands are occupied.

And you wind the twine around the arrowhead to get it to stay on the shaft of the arrow. And then after it's on nice and tight, then you put a bunch of pitch around it. And man, it really holds it fast. Now you've got an arrow that's going to really do the job. All thanks to your birch bark pitch. Although, let's, let's also give it hand for twine too.

The show that I've touted for a decade. Did they talk to me? I'm not watching it, because all this stuff thrills you. Do they, do they talk in it? Those are dialogue and narration, because on make it primitive, they just do their thing. They don't talk. I mean, they put people alone in the woods with a camera. So they're, you know, they're talking some, but there's not like Mike Rodus and come on and say,

what Jane is doing is, making an arrow. Gotcha. Yeah. Okay. I, maybe I'll give it a shot.

“I don't know why I'm resistant to it either. Chuck, I think it's just reality television.”

I have an aversion to it in general. Yeah. I mean, I guess it's reality. To me, reality TV, there's stuff like this and top chef that are like real things. And then there's, you know, people, the shows where they just pit people against each other to argue and fight, like those are two different things. For sure, for sure. Yeah, agreed, but yeah. So I think that's the

only reason I'm just like not diving in feet first. Well, the real question is, do you prefer to

cook your meat or smoke your meat? Do I have to choose? Now you don't. Well, there's a question Chuck about whether people started heating their meat to cook it or to smoke it. I'm a smoker. I'm on team smoker to put it in a Taylor Swift kind of way. As for what you prefer or what you think they were doing. What I think they were doing, I like smoked meat, but it is so bad for you that I just, I eat it sparingly. Yeah, same here. So yeah, I mean, the idea is that when they

hunted a big large megafauna that they would have needed to do something with that meat. You know, there's too much meat to even cook and eat all that once, even if everyone's super hungry. Right.

So it seems like smoking meat may have been the first thing. How they figure that out? I have no idea.

“I think that it's all just conjecture. It just makes sense. Essentially, it's just from the”

size of the animal, no band of hunter gathers as far as the size that we thought or think they are. They couldn't possibly have eaten like a woolly mammoth in one sitting. Yeah, how do they know they didn't just eat what they could and the rest went bad? Because humans have a long history of not being wasteful. And we still aren't today. I don't know. That's a great question, man. That's basically the argument against that. Well, maybe it's somebody's sight. Would they be able to tell

if it was just bones or if it was like former meat? Yeah, there's the tool marks for like getting meat off of the bone. There's teeth marks. Right. So there you go. Yeah, but that does it. Yeah, I guess yeah, if you looked at the whole skeleton and there was just like one leg that was eaten in the rest of it was there. Yeah. I think, yeah, I'm not sure what team I'm on now. I'm in my confused era.

“Well, we're both on team Horth because I know we both enjoy good fire and the idea that people”

have been sort of really interacting with fire. I know we've said that some people say a million years.

It really became widespread of around 400,000-ish years ago. Yeah. And that's when we really can have some pretty good archaeological evidence that there are parts all over the place. Yeah. People are building permanent setups or at least 70 semi-permanent setups where they would live and the Horth was a big, big part of that. Oh, yeah, for sure. You wouldn't just use the Horth to like cook necessarily. There were different kinds of Horths that were designed to do

different kinds of things. Like you would use the different Horths to fire play pottery, then you would maybe cook that one leg of mastodont, you know. And then yeah, you might have a different Horth for sitting around the campfire and socializing and taking troops. I wonder if you could cook in a kiln? I don't know. That'd be interesting. It'd be like dry suede. Yeah. So like you're you're your kiln or whatever, curing your pot. You might as well throw that turkey leg in there and

do you see what happens? Yeah. I'll bet it would not look right. It might be fine taste-wise, but it would not look right. Yeah. Emily's getting into pottery. Maybe we'll see. I'll try it out. Oh, yeah, do. Let me know how I ruined her kiln. Yeah. Let's say my kiln smells like turkey. Sorry. One of the things that I thought was pretty cool is that fire actually helped progress humans from age to age. It was the reason we transitioned from the stone age to

the metal ages starting with the copper age. We learned how to use fire to smell copper and then we started creating better and better tools from there. It was all thanks to fire. The whole thing, all of human prehistories swung on our use of fire right there. Yeah, for sure. And they've also

role in human biology. Right. Because humans have a gene mutation that we developed after fire,

seemingly, that made us less sensitive to smoke inhalation. Like, once fire started to be a thing, people would stand around it and start coughing and be like, well, this is no good. So they would stand back a little bit. But eventually the AHR gene, which helps us regulate our response to carcinogens and would smoke, came along. That mutation came along in that gene. So it was a pretty

“clear sign, I think. Yeah, and apparently it's just found in homosepience. You can't find it and”

like me, underthold DNA or homorectasty DNA. So it's like it just kind of goes to show you just how important fires are bodies actually evolved to to sit around fires better. Yeah. So we also learned to shout, I hate rabbits to get the smoke from coming your way. Oh, to where that came from. I don't know, it makes zero sense. I bet someone knows. Another one, Chuck, that's, it this makes sense, although I hadn't really thought about it before our circadian rhythms changed. Human is

far as animals go. We're the most alert in the evening. Most animals are not the most alert in the evening. They're, they're most alert earlier in the day. And the idea is that is because our interactions of fire allowed us to stay up much later. And hence our circadian rhythms changed

and adjusted likewise. That's right. And then finally, that all sounds good when you're sitting

around the fire, talking about hunting the mastodon. Mm-hmm. But that also means if Chuck is sick, Chuck, Chuck is getting other people sick. So ancient humans might have, you know, spread disease a little more readily because people are just hanging out more. Yeah, I was reading a study that they said that tuberculosis emerged in humanity about the same time we started using fire like being able to control it not necessarily make it ourselves, but at least to move it around.

And yeah, huddling together helps say a contagious disease spread much more easily because not only are you closer around a fire, you're also probably in like a rock shelter too. So

tuberculosis loves fires and rock shelters. Everybody knows that. That's right. And by the way,

“I like contagious. I think I'm going to go with that for no one. Thanks for that. I appreciate that,”

man. This is why you and I are so close. You're just supportive. What else you got, Chuck? I got nothing else. All right. I don't have anything else either. That's the history of fire. That's everything there is to know about fire. So don't even try to look for more. And since I said that, obviously it's time for listening to mail. I'm going to call this follow up to Gold Standard.

Hey guys, very much enjoyed the recent episode on the Gold Standard, but I have a small correction. Or it won't. In the book, those Ruby slippers. And I guess they're talking about the Wizard of Oz. Yes. Yeah, remember in the Gold Standard episode, we were talking about how it was an allegory for the debate over the Gold Standard and the Silver Standard and all that. And we're like, I guess the Ruby, there was the Ruby standard and Bubba, and this is what they're writing in about.

So in the book, those Ruby slippers were actually silver. And we're meant to represent the Silver Standard, not a Ruby standard. There was a charge debate going on in the States at the time. And whether we should use the Gold or Silver Standard, which was the allegory you discussed in the episode, the movie changes the Silver slippers to Ruby. I believe to show off the new technical or technology, parent medical. I'm no film buff, so please correct me if I'm mistaken.

Hey, that sounds good to me, Liz. Yeah. Thank you guys for what you do. I'm going to see live. And Akron, all right, Liz from Cleveland, can't wait to see there. And that is a great email. It is a great email. Thanks a lot, Liz. And Liz is among a handful of other people who wrote into tell us that, which made the whole thing make way more sense. So nuts to Hollywood and

“cheers to the original version of something. That's right. Ruby started. If you want to be like”

Liz and get in touch with us and tell us something we don't know, we love that kind of thing. You can send it in the email to [email protected]. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my heart radio visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. You know Rolldahl. He thought a bully Wonka in the BFG, but did you know he was a spy?

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