 Okay, we're back to three o'clock block likeable science one of the most likable shows in our lineup That's a Ethan Allen and he is the host guest Was it the guest host and I am whatever the other the other version of that is the guest host Okay, he's the real host of the show and we talk about things from science and technology that we stumble across In our daily readings, and this is one of the most interesting things that has come by in a while very high tech Yeah This is this is derived from an article in the daily cost KOS Very interesting newsletter on the internet. You can subscribe to it It's got a lot of interesting articles a lot of them about politicians But this one was at the tail end of was it yesterday morning's daily costs? And and I said what what is this because it the title of the article was the domestication of fire What does that got to do with Trump? nothing So I click on that and there's this fabulous article and I said it's an Ethan because I wanted to compare notes with Honor so you read the article. What did you think Ethan? It was great It was it was a real nice demonstration of how fire Was in some sense probably the first big disruptive technology and it changed humanity it Changed everything about how humanity lived it allowed us to Expand our range from the tropics and sub tropics up into the temperate zone even in the Arctic Allowed us to get more food more energy Probably altered Evolutionarily altered our heads. Let's be quite possibly allowing our brains to grow further freed up time Maybe the basis for language allowed us to start altering on the landscape That's probably some of the earliest climate change that we were actually inducing there. So, uh, yeah, it's It's sort of uncountable of its impact. Yeah. Yeah, well, that's unpacked that you just you said a mouthful just now There's a lot of stuff there So, I mean, I'm just thinking at random about some of the things that fire did for us Um, I guess the one that comes to mind at first is it's a defensive mechanism It defends against the beasts of the wild because they don't like fire and you can chase them away with fire and Survive their attack. This is very important. Right Another one would be some of these deserve more conversation others less another one would be Keeping warm, right, you know, they didn't have shelters. They had caves which were dark And cold and the fire could you know help them survive in bad weather indeed other than the very shallow entrance to a cave You can't really go very far into a cave without fire because your cave is dark plus Often other things living in the cave some of which might be fairly large and nasty I might not like you being there or might decide that you will be a good meal But with fire again, you can drive them out take over their space and then yes, you have shelter We're talking about caves Can you see all these drawings on the caves? I remember the first time I actually saw drawings on a cave It was in it was in a place called Lazy Z in southwest France Quite remarkable, but the cave was dark, right? How could you possibly draw anything intelligible on the wall of a cave? Unless you had light right here go fire, right? So indeed fire is probably in some sense responsible for human artistic creativity, too Yeah, yeah, I mean the idea of putting pen to paper so to speak actually creating a graphic that depended on Light right in a cave with a with a surface that you could actually draw on So that was pretty interesting and if you could if you could draw something on the cave You could have conceptual thoughts and you could start developing language By drawing on the cam recorder thoughts, too And it's a different medium other than simply verbalizing things. You know, it's a it's a fixed medium long lasting medium Yeah, other than the trends in nature of speech. So yeah, again, very powerful influence I guess you can't you can't do any of that without fire basically and just just to just to put a time frame on this This is probably around 80,000 years ago 80,000 years ago, which doesn't seem like it's that that much you know and It probably happened before humankind Left the East Rift Valley in East Africa. Yeah, I think this article suggests that somewhere probably around 400,000 years ago. We actually probably gained mastery of fire 100,000. Yeah, yeah, it was quite a long while ago There's there's some evidence we were using fire perhaps a million a million and a half years ago that the early Romance at least used it But they may not have known how to control it to start fighters and keep them keep them going Things move slowly in those days. Yes, in order to figure out how to make a horse Probably took him a hundred right Yeah, exactly, you know, whereas, you know, the iPhone came in five years Right. Yeah, this is yeah, things will be much more slowly and I get the biggest the biggest challenge of all was that how do you keep it burning? How do you keep the fire burning? You got to get the fuel You got to keep on supplying it and You have to have a way of having a place to have it burn Without getting doused in the rain or swept in the wind Oh without without starting and getting out of control, right? Yeah, or where they give create a forest fire and burn everything around you, right and hurt you, right? So, you know these these two you're right. They took a long time to figure it out I'm sure there are lots of false starts. So, how do you think and this is a question that's not really answered in the article How do you think that the humankind ever really found fire? I mean where they could control it where they could it at all Where did it come from? Yeah, when one can only speculate that early People saw fires that were naturally occurring saw animals fleeing from them Perhaps wandering through aftermath found some roasted plants and roasted animals and being hungry ate those and realized they were like good and tasty and gave Faster energy to them. So, you know, it made that connection between the fire They somebody had to make the connection right fire was had had beneficial effects, right? But but once having made that connection. They had a actually get it Right put yourself out on the on the planes there. How did you how could you get fire? It's not so easy, right? And once you've got it if you don't if you don't understand how to make it Then you then keep it going is this sort of incredibly valuable thing to keep always going keep a stash of hot coals You can start a new fire. Oh, yeah, that's right. Yeah comes this almost Sacred duty, you know, it's the life or death matter, right? Well, certainly But it strikes me also that this is Some one person whether he be Neanderthal or Cromanian man One person figured it out And he had very little schooling by the way One person figured it out and he was able to do it But I think the remarkable thing is I don't think we know for sure but this was happening in various places now it could be that they discovered it in the East Rift Valley and then as as You know the diaspora took place they took they took with them one thought and that thought is We better know about fire this fire will will save us Yeah, I mean, I'm guessing that it got independently discovered a number of times and probably at last, you know There were probably groups that discovered it and then lost fire and died out and yeah Oops, you know, they didn't make it you know But somebody else would discover how to do it how to use it how to control it a little better Maybe the next time so lightning sounds like a good prospect Don't you think I mean if there was a lightning bolt and something was burning because of the lightning And then they would see that it was happening and they would try to take a piece of burning material burning wood Whatever and and reduce it to their own control and try to keep it alive Yeah, once once you begin to understand what fire could do for you, right? And understood the basic process of adding more wood to it to keep it going Then yeah, and you started the process of sort of domestication of fire and Presumably groups found that very valuable to do. Yeah Now there was this movie, you know, and I was looking at this issue in preparation for today's show I'm trying to remember about the movie and it was a movie with Ray Don Chong Who in those days was really a knockout And and a few other guys and they all wore these in fact They got some kind of Academy Award for makeup because everybody looked like Neanderthal And and somebody invented a language a caveman language and they spoke the language in this movie The name of the movie ultimately I remembered was quest for fire 1981 and it was a movie without any English in it Without any civilization whatsoever with these fabulous scenes the scenery stretching across, you know, 50 miles at a time with with the small tribe, maybe a dozen people of Who were fascinated with fire who knew how important it was and they were involved in a kind of fisticuffs with another tribe down the block And in the process they lost their fire So they were there was freezing on a little island in a kind of swamp They were hungry and cold They were gonna die and they sent out a search party to search for fire and that's why the movies called quest for fire And it teaches you what you would have to do in those days Yeah, and it's set 80,000 years, so they knew about fire earlier, right? But now this was you know a quest to regain the power that they had had with their fire Right, yeah, and obviously if you were someone in that Culture who understood fire and knew how to keep it going knew how to revitalize it from embers and all You'd be in a position of real power. You you might be sort of a shaman or a leader of some sort, right? Yeah, well it was it was a mysterious thing I imagine sitting around a campfire when we were kids and looking into the flames. It was hypnotic Yes, some people inappropriately so the pyro pyromaniacs But but you know looking at it and seeing the hypnotic effect of it you think maybe this is An eternal being this is a God. This is a spiritual Person that is way beyond, you know your experience and you thus you attach a religious significance to the fire Right, I mean other than not being sort of cellular in nature fire is very much as many of the characteristics of life actually Yeah, well, yeah, and it's you know staring the fire has inspired poets and scientists alike The famous chemist Kekele is said to have discovered the ring like structure of benzene Well staring into fire watching the fire Tongues loop around each other and then realizing that's how that's how the carbon atoms in benzene had to be structured to make it Give it the properties it had Nobody had figured out for us great great puzzle in chemistry. So how benzene could possibly have its weird properties Well, it's truly one of the critical parts of our universe And what what did they say in the old times? What was it? Oh, this is slightly religious, but There are only four things in the world. It's fire wind water and earth that's it, but you can see the you know the The power and the importance of fire in the development of humanity. All right You we would not we would not be here. That's what I would not be here That's what I said. I mean it was truly disruptive in the sense It just radically altered the course that humanity was taking we were we were confined to a narrow little Band of tropics and subtropics. We spent virtually all of our time running down food eating food had you know That was sort of the extent of our lives Once we had fire You can get a lot more nourishment a lot faster protein. Yeah, and protein is very important to human development Evolutionary scale one of the nice points that article made was it it allowed scavenging to become effective, right? You can only scavenge a dead animal for a little while before it's rotting right and then you can't eat it Or you'll get a second eye, but you can take that same rotting animal and cook that meat and it's fine It's a great source of protein still, you know little maggots and renter just extra protein. Yeah, so now There's a suggestion that over time and we're talking about hundreds of thousands of years Fire allowed you To it's easier to eat it's easy if you're going to do me a fire helps you Make the food soft right and therefore you don't have to work as hard and this led to an evolutionary development in the In the skeleton of the head in that and the teeth right in the jaw You didn't have to have this massive brow ridge to ankle a but anchor a bunch of jaw muscles on anymore You didn't have to have a huge ridge on the top of your skull to hold a lot of heavy jaw muscles Yeah, it became much easier because it breaks in not just for me, but for starches or Grains or anything cooking them make some softer some more accessible and more digestible So then so you eat more you eat faster you can digest it faster And you're more efficient in general in getting protein into your body and protein is what makes protein led to the evolution of the bigger brain All right, so I mean it's like if you go all the way back go back to that 400,000 point where presumably it was discovered in the East River Valley It changed the evolution of the species right fire was our friend our partner in evolution Fire made it possible for us to survive to eat to succeed in hunting to improve But it goes further than that. I want to talk about the diaspora for a moment You know somehow from the East River Valley Humanity got to go everywhere in the world Different ways with different evolutionary results obviously between the races And to cross the Siberian Straits, which are very very cold. They were colder than now. They're a little warmer But how do you do that you can't go into a an Arctic environment and survive Without a way of staying warm and fire allowed that thus fire allowed the diaspora It allowed us to spread out of this this very narrow band of tropics subtropics that we were as as Essentially apes we were confined to Once we had fire yes, we could spread north we could spread south Many more resources new food new food sources You know all kinds of Opportunities yeah opened up. Well, and let's talk about the fire and weapons You needed a sharp stick you needed a piece of rock That was sharp as a weapon and fire gets you there fire applied to the stick could make it Sharp and pointed I couldn't do that otherwise The same thing with with rock if you've made the rock hot you could flake off right the pieces of it and make a blade I know this is ridiculous in the sense that you know here. We are 2019 we're talking about something that happened somewhere between 80,000 or 400,000 years ago But I think we have to understand this sort of thing good stop and appreciate it. Yeah, absolutely There was there was a real change that came about and then it came out because one sort of simple thing That's fire right. Yeah. Well, I think it's about time to take a break Ethan Why don't we take a break of maybe what 10,000 years or so? Who'll come back and we'll talk more about the domestication of fire. Okay? Hello, I'm Dave Stevens host of the cyber underground. This is where we discuss everything that relates to computers It's just kind of scare you out of your mind So come join us every week here on think tech Hawaii calm one PM on Friday afternoons And then you can go see all our episodes on YouTube just look up the cyber underground on YouTube All our shows will show up and please follow us. We're always giving you current relevant information to protect you Keep a new safe. Aloha Aloha, I'm Yukari Kunisue the host of Konnichiwa, Hawaii Japanese talk show on think tech Hawaii Konnichiwa, Hawaii is all Japanese broadcast show and Streamed live on think tech at 2 p.m. Every other Monday. Thank you so much for watching our show We look forward to seeing you then I'm Yukari Kunisue. Mahalo Hey, we're back with Ethan Allen and me talking about the domestication of fire You know, I don't think we can forget for a moment that it's built into us We didn't get here by some magical process. We are the product of evolution over those 400,000 years And fire is part of the evolution and in our in our DNA in our way of looking at things In our very existence is built in a kind of relationship with fire. Maybe that's why it's so fascinating To talk about it. Yeah, so and it's so fascinating I mean to if you you sit around a campfire it is there's something very mystical about that experience almost and there's something It's a bonding experience it's people to sit there and stare at the fire and they start talking and This article makes the point that that you know that kind of situation may have helped lead Humanity into the use of language actually. Yeah, so it's it creates a social bond to be around the fire Why and being around the fire through the darkness of the night? Offers a kind of cocoon where you can actually exchange ideas you have to build a language But you have to exchange ideas and and feelings and whatever motivations And and thus create a bit of a community around the fire Right and expand the length of day and at the same time because you were using the fire to cook your food You actually had the energy to stay up and Communicate yeah, it's a magnet. Yeah, it's a magnet for everything you do really to eat and cook and sleep warmly and Socialize at night around the fire It it brings these people together and in so doing it creates a society a Bond a community and before you know it now you have a family. It's all around the hearth Mm-hmm, and you have we can talk about dogs later. That's another part but but And then it goes to language communication and as you said it goes to religion All things are these things are inextricably intertwined in our DNA over 400,000 years, right? I mean if you think about many many religions use fire in various now more symbolic ways shapes and forms as a rebirth Purifying or really Rebossing of humanity whatever in various Traditions the fire plays very critical roles in some of them Yeah, we've just had a show with rabbi Krabz and Jansky of Khabar of Hawaii And he told me that well, I mean he reminded me that there are there's a What they call an eternal light in every synagogue which burns all the time and That that fire is symbolic, right? And so I think and has to be eternal Just the way the fire was should have been eternal in quest for fire the movie Yeah, I mean symbolically it's saying that's this is critical that we keep fire in our lives and we keep it going we understand Critical nature of that this act Keep fire burning some fundamental level. We must understand early on getting a fire going was probably a very very tough thing I don't know if you've ever tried starting a fire without proper implement It's the article talks about it over a period of time It was probably earlier than 80,000 no recent in 80,000 years ago. They invented the I don't want to say fire drill But that's what I was right was a fire drill right a little wooden stick that you write with a bow on it That you move back and forth so it spins and spins and spins into dry wood and hopefully Friction eventually generates enough heat you can get a little tinder going and there's no not too much wind And you aren't too klutzy. Maybe you can get a fire. I mean, it's a unless you're a master that technique It's a very difficult and chancey thing to do, but it's a lot it's a lot better than you know hiking across the Terrain for miles and days to find a chance to find somebody else who had fire it steal it from you And you know, but every Boy Scout knows how to do this now And you look at a Boy Scout with the fire drill and you realize that this has been Implicit in the in the human condition for how many tens of thousands of years we could not have survived without it Well sure no I mean if you go out camping one of the key things you take with you is the stuff to make fire You know lighter matches flint and steel something that's going to enable you to make fire because you know, that's that's part of the whole thing I mean, I mean Jack London years ago wrote his story to build a fire where This becomes a literally a life-and-death matter whether this guy can build a fire or not He's stuck in the 75 below zero weather and oops and spoiler alert, you know, he doesn't make it So somewhere around the turn of the 20th century. I mean the year 1900 You know at the year 1900 we had we had fire. We had gas lamps on the streets. We had kerosene stoves We lived in many ways on the same fire the same flames that those guys You know on the on the on the on the fields In the woods and across the mountains We're using in 80,000 80,000 years ago and we were still doing it, right, but sometime Right around then around the turn of the 20th century. We invented electricity Electricity and so let me ask you this and then we gave up smoking. We gave up smoking So when's the last time you saw an open flame? Last year last year probably how the other than maybe a random candle charcoal and a barbecued a barbecue Maybe I can't fire or get you there We don't see much right now Before they were absolutely central and you kept your kept your home fire burning, right? Oh God and you look at our literature if you look at our culture in general every globally, right fire is All through it in every way that the words of the notion of fire the meaning of fire the effect of fire It's everywhere and we haven't gotten rid of that and we're gonna get in more and more high-tech things That would be no open flames in the next century But but we will still be thinking about and talking about fire Absolutely, absolutely so Electricity has replaced fire in so many ways It's the it's the you know fire was the technology Electricity is the new technology and beyond that. I don't know what what happens after that It'll be something else remarkable, and I think what it makes us Appreciate is that we we as I said we would not be here. We would not be anywhere We'd still be in the East Rift Valley, right? Had we not had the benefit of this now and that means that people worth thinking about how to survive the great human the great human attribute thought and Creativity and innovation and they figured it out took a long time, but they figured it out I mean it's it's a classic, you know Darwinian selection here the the ones that didn't figure out Never made it right The ones who did and knew how to do it and to pass that past that ability on to their offspring Right the brains and in quest for fire You know the group of people who sent out the party to steal the fire from the next tribe They survived But but in other parties they other tribes they didn't think of that and they lost the fire and they died That were the end of their line. No, I'm sure I'm sure the loss of a fire has killed off Many lines of people over the over the eons, you know No, I used to think that when worse came to worse that that I could disappear into the north woods and Reinvent those early days That I would take my Boy Scout fire drill and I would make a little fire and I would survive and that would be critical to survive And I would I would then hunt more effectively with my sharpened stick I would I would kill an animal use his skin for my my clothing and I Would I would gather around a group of people who would who would enjoy a kind of common interest and become a little Society and I would somehow survive and what did you say Einstein Einstein's great quote? What was it? Oh, well, he said World Wars about the world wars. He said I know not what weapons will be used for World World War 3 But I can tell you World War 4 will be fought with sticks and stones That's where we may be right and there won't be many of us either Big back there and we know we won't be evolutionary Evolution wise you won't be as strong as we used to be either now that that control of fire and the ability to create it I mean remember the movie cast away when Tom Hanks finally after a long struggles gets it makes his fire and Enables him suddenly now he can doesn't have to eat raw crabs and with slimy gooey stuff in LX He can cook the crowd Yeah, yeah So, you know being reduced to the state of nature is really not a likely possibility anymore Even if you know how to make a fire drill And so I think what we what we got is we got the new technology we got electricity We got nuclear energy and we really have to make the most of it because Can't go back. I don't think we can't go back. He's in no if we go back There's only going to be a very small number of people right now. Oh, yeah Yeah, you can't turn back the clock, but we have to appreciate what happened right because there are lessons in innovation In the development of the human condition And so it's worth having this conversation. We're studying technology and it's it's as early as right You could think of this as that Humanity got a hold of a of an energy source there with fire, right? Now we're looking around looking at solar energy being able to capture that a wind energy a wave energy It's over. We're searching for more and better energies and atomic energy Nuclear energy, I mean all these different paths. We're now searching for more energy in better ways to get energy It's not just simple combustion Well, just like fire we become dependent on our discovery We become dependent on the disruptive technology we stumbled into right right now We have other disruptive technologies that we are dependent on we can't give them up, right? And I guess that's a lesson here too because if you give up something you become dependent on well You're in trouble right So the the comparison I want to make before we close here today Then is the second technology that humankind discovered probably a little after fire was Talking about domestication of dogs domestication of dogs that was again a pivotal event but that shaped our futures and even more radically altered the future of the domestic dog But had again powerful far-ranging effects on both groups In terms of our food our ability to get things done to go places To travel to protect ourselves all of these things were Mightly impacted by domesticating dogs. Yeah, and this happened many tens of thousands of years ago and like fire We became dependent. We've developed a dependency with dogs. Maybe that's the magic of the relationship And they are our partner in evolution. They've helped us evolve without them Well, I don't know I I appreciate dogs on an affection basis But truth is that man's evolution humankind's evolution over the years has really depended on having dogs in the East East River Valley and elsewhere in the Diaspora And and right on through maybe what the 18th century or so 17th century You really couldn't get along without having your furry your furry friend who would protect you sure. I'm in a classic Whole shepherds with dogs or trained to keep flocks together. I mean that was Remarkable stuff. Yeah. Yeah dog was was a key Dog domestication with a key technology if you will So you could get along today without a dog is possible right to do And yet I think it's worth taking a moment as we are To look back and appreciate from whence we came in terms of developing Species on the planet if you think about it a fire was probably critical to helping bring the dog into our orbit basically because one can envision Walls hanging out around that the periphery of fires You know waiting to get extra food and those that sort of behave well look gradually became dogs And that was that didn't slunk off in the woods and stayed as well And you were telling me about an experiment that was going on to Domesticate fox wild animal wild dogs today to make them. It's how did that work? So this isn't actually it's still ongoing in in Russia, but back in the mid I think 60s it started this one guy took lots of foxes and he started breeding the calmest gentlest foxes together and also breeding the wildest nastiest ones together and Because of the way foxes reproducing and do this once a year and you get a new generation and After 15 years 15 generations. He had foxes that were Changing in their appearance their tails were curling up their coats were changing their faces are shortening a little bit their ears Were what thing a little bit and they're changing in temperament. They're becoming very nice. They're becoming dog-like basically After just 15 generations and now I think it's gone on for 30 40 50 years now, and yeah, they've got way more So they have these these wonderful domestic foxes now as or There are no longer real foxes. They are basically a sort of second line of domestic dog We're married to dogs a species is married Man, give me a family who wouldn't want one. Give me a kid who wouldn't want one, right? You know not everybody has them, but it's clear that you know We are we are married to them as a species the other thing is like like fire You don't you don't see much fire open flame around these days except in wildfires in California But in terms of dogs, we do see dogs Not only in the home, but we we see them used to sniff out drugs in the airports We see them on the battlefield as we did on World War two I'm sure they still have these German shepherd dogs in the battlefields elsewhere And they'll probably continue to play a role because they are the remarkable thing about dogs is you can instruct them to do something And they will do what you want, right? How different is that from a computer, right? No, in a sense, right, but they're mobile and they have capabilities that we don't have right They have a much better sense of smell for instance than we have so yeah, I can yeah, right So I think we have to be aware of all these things as we go forward and learn about innovation some early technology They're still sort of reverberating with us, right? Right and maybe it drives us to be innovative to see how well we've done with these early technologies We know it at some level in our DNA and makes it it makes us Redutarily makes us innovative. We are innovative species, right? I'm sure you know the genes for innovation have been passed along and survived those that didn't have it didn't make it Yeah, and I feel now between you and me that it makes us do this show Thank you. It's a thank you. Thank you to talk with you. Take care. Take care