Apes making fire

5 Responses to Apes making fire

1. TinyCO2 says:

   1 January 2017 at 05:22

   https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jun/03/chimpanzees-can-cook-and-prefer-cooked-food-study-shows
   They’ve done interesting experiments with chimps and discovered that they like cooked food.
   Additionally, your idea that man learnt to make fire is probably wrong in that the first thing man would have learnt is how to keep a fire going 24/7 and how to transport it. Maybe some of the earliest trade was in fire?
2. Scottish-Sceptic says:

   1 January 2017 at 08:27

   I think a lot of my views on animals and fires were pre-conditioned by watching Bambi as a child. Instead of being afraid of fire, the wild Chimps seem to almost ignore it.
   There is however this article: Congo: A Group of Chimpanzees Seem to Have Mastered Fire . I’ve not been able to verify the validity of this article and it could be an April 1st spoof, but it says:
   “Ubundu| A group of bonobo apes living in the Salonga National Park, may have mastered the basic practice of creating and using fire. This particular group of almost three hundred specimens from this rare and extremely intelligent race of great apes, have been under close surveillance by a team of primatologist for the last three years, and seem to have recently developed a primitive fire building technique using rocks and twigs.”
   My hunch is that this is creative write up of the videos which show a chimp being taught to light fires through demonstrating the technique. As such all it shows is that having made lighting a fire as simple as opening a box of matches, that (some) apes – if they were already aware of this activity – may want to use it.
   I think this shows that if there were a natural source of fire – like a natural gas vent which had naturally caught on fire, that chimps finding this may start using it habitually.
3. TinyCO2 says:

   1 January 2017 at 11:31

   Yes, natural flames first. Or even just natural heat? Rocks at midday in Africa? Hot springs? Mudpools? I certainly thing that man discovered the value of heat before it discovered how to make it. Did we discover boiled eggs before BBQ?
4. TinyCO2 says:

   1 January 2017 at 11:49

   Another programme I saw was one of those Ray Mears type things about what early Brits might have eaten. He postulated that they might have consumed roots that are poisonous but rendered edibly by treatment. He visited some tribe that still did the same thing – where they take poisonous roots, put them in a sack and leave them in the river for about a week. The roots were then cooked. The two processes removed the poisons to a level acceptable to life. What accident or thought process led to that kind of discovery?
5. Scottish-Sceptic says:

   1 January 2017 at 16:40

   The key is a testable hypothesis – the idea someone/some-ape spontaneously came up with the idea of fire – may be superficially attractive, but there is no way to disprove it.
   However the hypothesis that apes would make use of fire, is one that could be tested. In other words, I’m trying to put a bit more rigour into the subject of trying to work out how primitive technology could develop.

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