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

Let’s jump forward a couple of million years to around 1 million years before the common era, and let’s talk about fire. When hominins learned to control fire, they didn’t just invent cooking and find a way to stay warm and keep wild animals at bay during the night. They didn’t just make it safer for their species to move out of the trees and take up permanent residence on the ground. Those are all big things, important things…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. 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 — very, very, very slowly — 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. <a href="https://medium.com/@Et3rnal_Stoic/chapter-2-3-c-1-million-bce-homo-erectus-masters-fire-21865e7ee50c">Read More</a>