3rd Street

3rd Street


When our ancestors settled in to occupy a site, even for a relatively short time, the first thing they did was establish a hearth. The hearth was important for warmth, nutrition, and social interaction: 


The earliest hearths are at least 790,000 years old, and some researchers think cooking may reach back more than 1.5 million years. Control of fire provided a new tool with several uses—including cooking, which led to a fundamental change in the early human diet. Cooking released nutrients in foods and made them easier to digest. It also rid some plants of poisons.
Over time, early humans began to gather at hearths and shelters to eat and socialize. As brains became larger and more complex, growing up took longer—requiring more parental care and the protective environment of a home. Expanding social networks led, eventually, to the complex social lives of modern humans [1]. 


For Homo erectus, hearths were temporary, located where needed to process the yield of successful hunts [2]. Some sites were occupied seasonally. Erectus took the social benefits of the hearth—campfires, really--with them on the road. When sufficient food was collected to justify it, a hearth and a “home”, however short-term, were created. 


Neanderthals, existing with and replacing erectus beginning about 250,000 years ago, were a more settled crowd. They lived in caves, tents, and mud-and-stick huts. Foraging out from where they lived, they brought food to the hearth. Likely this made the home more socially important. People learned more of their history, and of themselves, as they interacted around less temporary hearths.


Then Homo sapiens showed up. They were technologically advanced. Their weapons and tools were more varied and effective. They could start fires several ways, including by stone sparks, where Neanderthal could only twist wood drills. They were altogether more efficient hunters, more densely populated, and occupied more of the landscape. From the time sapiens spread throughout Neanderthal territory, the latter was probably doomed to extinction. It remains unclear precisely how and why neanderthalis disappeared. But occupation, assimilation, or competition, or all three, the mechanisms didn’t matter. Neanderthals were another large mammal species vaporized in the trail of modern humans. 


Or maybe not. About 20,000 years ago, human beings experienced massive cultural strides. This is the “Upper Paleolithic Revolution”, which saw enormous advances in tool and weapon technology, hearth construction, and especially, art and language. Much was happening in this time—climate was warming, sea levels, rising, human population density increasing [3]. It is possible—even likely—that social interactions themselves, feeding on increased communication among people living settled lives around familiar hearths, had important feedback effects that pushed culture forward [ ]. There is also a theory that interbreeding among sapiens and neanderthalensis was responsible for much of the revolution [5]. 


However it happened (and, like most things ecological, it is highly likely to have had multiple contributing causes), by the end of the last glaciation, humans were ready to take the next step toward the megacity.




Notes


[1] Quoted from (http://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/behavior/hearths-shelters . I was led to this site by seeing the quote at http://www.historyofinformation.com/index.php , which is an outstanding web portal, carefully referenced, containing a constantly-updated wealth of information regarding the history of human information exchange.


[2] The framework of these paragraphs is from pages 27 – 29 in Pyne, S.J. 1997. Vestal Fire: An Environmental History, Told Through Fire, of Europe and Europe’s Encounter With the World. University of Washington Press, Seattle. 


[3] A good description of the Paleolithic changes in the state-of-the environment can be found in Cunliffe, B. 2008. Europe Between the Oceans. Yale University Press, New Haven. 


[4]


[5] Cochran, G. and H. Harpending. 2009. The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution. Basic Books, NY.