Humans have a unique relationship with fire. At least 800,000 years ago, if not 1 million years ago, human ancestors had control over fire. Regular use of fire is evident in the archaeological record by 500,000 years ago. Hominins certainly used fire for light, warmth, and protection from predators.
Anthropologists think the controlled use of fire led to significant evolutionary outcomes, including cultural shifts as well as changes in the shape and function of the hominin body. Certainly, some of the major changes to human behavior and form resulted from cooking. Physical changes over time—to the gut, face, and brain, in particular—were influenced by the processing and ingestion of cooked foods. And researchers suggest that fire’s light may have even affected sleep-wake patterns and therefore hominins’ hormonally controlled body rhythms.
Is the control of fire what sets hominins apart from wild animals? Are the burned bones and plants found at nearly 1-million-year-old sites a sign of the emergence of the domesticated hominin?
When scientists consider the process of domesticating plants and animals, they think of artificial selection—for example, crossbreeding of plants, directed mating of animals, or culling—and the desired evolutionary outcomes of those activities. The regular, controlled use of fire by hominins has evolutionary consequences; could this behavior be an unconscious form of artificial selection of hominins by hominins—in other words, selection without wish or expectation of change that inevitably alters the population?
What do you think? Are humans still wild?
Me, in 2016 @sapiens.org
www.sapiens.org/biology/huma...
#BioAnth #Fire
