Richard Wrangham's cooking hypothesis suggests that a ready supply of cooked food allowed the Homo lineage to develop large, complex brains.
The earliest evidence for fire dates back nearly 440 million years. Our hominin ancestors first used natural wildfires to flush out prey and forage for food. Richard Wrangham's cooking hypothesis suggests that a ready supply of cooked food allowed the Homo lineage to develop its large, complex brains. Of humanity’s greatest inventions, fire remains as important today as in the time of our ancient ancestors — if not as apparent. We have replaced the hearth with electric ovens and central heating, but the burning of fossil fuels accounts for 63.5 percent of U.S. electricity generation. We still heat our homes and cook our food with fire — just in a more roundabout manner. We even use fire in ways our ancestors couldn’t have imagined. The internal combustion engine has replaced animals and our own wobbly legs as the preferred method of travel. We can go farther in a day than the vast majority of our ancestors did in a lifetime and even escape the confines of our planet. Thanks to fire. But fire has done more than create the energy that makes our lives comfortable. By one Harvard professor’s account, fire altered the course of our evolution.
Fire, a brief history
First, some Chem 101. Fire requires three elements for its reaction: oxygen, fuel, and a heat source. Since two of the three elements are provided naturally by plants, the history of fire became intricately tied to them.
Some of our earliest evidence for fire goes back 440 million years to the Silurian period when Earth’s climate stabilized and plants and animals began to move to land. Of note, this period provides the earliest fossil evidence of vascular plants. From this point, fire becomes a recurrent phenomenon with times of high and low activity based on environmental conditions. During the Carboniferous period, atmospheric oxygen hit a record high of 31 percent and plants spread across the supercontinent Pangea, so charcoal records suggest a lot of fire activity during this period. Conversely, the pittance of charcoal from the Triassic period suggests low atmospheric oxygen and fewer plants. Jumping a few million years to the late Miocene, hominins moved to the grasslands and began to further diverge from their ape relatives — likely due to the difference between the African savanna and the dense jungle. Here, they would have also encountered wildfires with far more regularity.
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