Chapter 2.3 — c. 1 million BCE: Homo erectus Masters Fire

<p>Let&rsquo;s jump forward a couple of million years to around 1 million years before the common era, and let&rsquo;s talk about fire. When hominins learned to control fire, they didn&rsquo;t just invent cooking and find a way to stay warm and keep wild animals at bay during the night. They didn&rsquo;t just make it safer for their species to move out of the trees and take up permanent residence on the ground.</p> <p>Those are all big things, important things&hellip;but the mastery of fire did more than that. Those ancient innovators who first learned to control fire opened a door to a new world of experimentation and exploration of the universe.</p> <p>Adding fire to a toolkit that already included stone tools would promote bigger hominin brains because of the effects of cooking on diet and digestion. Then &mdash; very, very, very slowly &mdash; fire mastery would lead our ancestors to metalworking and metallurgy, which would lead to alchemy, which would lead to chemistry, which would lead to nuclear physics.</p> <p><a href="https://medium.com/@Et3rnal_Stoic/chapter-2-3-c-1-million-bce-homo-erectus-masters-fire-21865e7ee50c"><strong>Read More</strong></a></p>
Tags: Homo erectus