Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

Homo erectus may also have invented cooking. This is inferred because, although he was 60 per cent larger than his predecessors, he had a smaller gut and teeth. This could be accounted for by cooking which, in breaking down the indigestible fibre of plants into energy-giving carbohydrate, puts fewer demands on the teeth and alimentary canal. For this reason, the most interesting H. erectus site is probably Zhoukoudien (literally ‘Dragon Bone Hill’), a cave situated about twenty-five miles south-west of Beijing in a range of limestone hills. In a series of excavations carried out mainly in the 1930s, the site was dated to about 400,000–300,000 years ago. The significance of Zhoukoudien is that it appears to have been a base camp from which H. erectus hunted and brought back their kills to be cooked and eaten. But were the animals (again, large mammals such as elephants, rhinoceros, boars and horses) actually cooked? A quantity of hackberry seeds was found at Zhoukoudien, making them the earliest plant remains known, and they probably survived only because they had been burnt. The consensus now appears to be that this wasn’t the purposeful use of fire, as we would understand it, but the issue – like so much else at that period – remains unresolved.²¹

Claims have been made for the use of fire as far back as 1.42 million years ago. At least thirteen African sites provide evidence, the earliest being Chesowanja in Kenya, which contained animal bones alongside Oldowan tools and burnt clay. As many as fifty pieces of burnt clay were found and, to some palaeontologists, the layout of certain stones suggested a hearth. Tantalisingly, no burnt clay was found outside this narrow area and tests on the clay itself showed it to have been fired to about 400°, roughly typical of campfires.²² Stone tools have been found in association with burnt animal remains at several sites in China dating from before one million years ago. Johan Goudsblom has pointed out that no animal species controls fire, as humans do. Some prehistorians believe that early humans may have followed fire, because roasted animal flesh is better preserved (chimpanzees have been observed searching for afzelia beans after bush fires; normally too tough to eat, after a fire they crumble easily).²³ The archaeologist C. K. Brain advanced the idea that it was man’s control of fire which helped convert him from being the prey of the big cats to being a predator – fire offered protection that earlier man lacked. And in Spain there is evidence of the use of fire as a way to corral elephants into a bog, where they were butchered. Later, keeping a fire alive continuously would have encouraged social organisation.²⁴ The latest evidence reports a campfire, with burnt flint fragments, in tiny clusters, suggesting hearths, dated to 790,000 years ago, at Gesher Benot Yaʾaqov in northern Israel. The control and use of fire may therefore count as one of primitive man’s three earliest ideas.

From such ancient skulls as have been unearthed, we may conclude that there were two early spurts in brain growth, the first being the larger, each of which was associated with a change in stone technology: these were the first tools, associated with H. habilis, and bifacial Acheulian tools, associated with H. erectus. After this, apart from the use of fire, only one thing seems to have happened for nearly a million years. This was the ‘standardisation’ of the hand-axe, around 700,000 years ago. Allowing for individuality, and for the fact that, about a million years ago, H. erectus spread out over much of Eurasia (i.e., not the northern latitudes, Australia or the Americas) – and therefore had to deal with very different forms of stone – hand-axes everywhere nevertheless began to show an extraordinary degree of uniformity. Thousands of hand-axes have now been examined by palaeontologists from all over the world, and they have shown that, although of different sizes, most axes are constructed in almost identical proportions. This is not chance, say the experts. V. Gordon Childe, the eminent Australian archaeologist, actually went so far as to say that the standardised tool was ‘a fossil idea’ and that it needed a certain capacity for abstract thought on the part of H. erectus. In order to produce a standardised tool, Childe argued, early man needed some sort of image of tools in general. Others have gone further. ‘Hand-axes from many . . . sites, show that . . . the mental apparatus already existed for [early man to make] basic mathematical transformations without the benefit of pen, paper or ruler. It was essentially the same operation as Euclid was to formalise hundreds of thousands of years later.’²⁵