Fire
San men around a campfire
It was probably people in Africa who first began to use fire for cooking, about 800,000 or a million years ago. People had always known about fire, because fires happened naturally when there were lightning strikes or sparks from two rocks hitting together. Probably the first people who made their own fires started them from fires that were already going. Then they figured out how to make fires by hitting flints together or by rubbing two sticks together.
Fire was a very early invention, only a little after simple tools like stone choppers, and before clothing.
Why did people want to punch Socrates?
Where did Egyptians bury your liver?
How old are the Rocky Mountains?
What does a half-timbered house look like?
How do you spin wool?
(a project)
Making their own fires let people cook their food. Cooked food is easier to digest than raw food, and people can get more energy from it with less work. This extra energy may have been what helped people grow bigger brains than monkeys, and get smarter so they could invent other things.
At the same time, once people needed fires to cook their food, they couldn't just go off alone into the forest - they needed to all sit together around their fire. In the Stone Age, it was too hard to make your own fire. This encouraged people to learn to get along with each other and cooperate instead of fighting, and helped to form organized tribes.
To find out more about early people and fire, check out these books from Amazon or from your local library:
Main African Science page
More about fire
Fire as a chemical reaction
Main science page
Main Africa page
Egyptian Science (part of Africa!)
Islamic Science
Indian Science
Kidipede - History for Kids home page
