I once came across a curious anthropological account of the importance of fire is a section in Feliks Koneczny's book "On the Plurality of Civilizations"[0] written in the 1930s. (The OCR or transcription isn't great, but the text is still able to be read.) Others might find it interesting.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.scribd.com/doc/4464979/ON-THE-PLURALITY-OF-CIVILIZATIONS-Feliks-Koneczny-Entire-Book#page=49" rel="nofollow">https://www.scribd.com/doc/4464979/ON-THE-PLURALITY-OF-CIVIL...</a>
From, uh, 2013.<p>And the book, <i>Catching Fire</i>, mentioned in the article and from which most of the info is gleaned is from 2010. The scholar in the article, Richard Wrangham, wrote the book.<p><i>Sapiens</i> by Yuval Noah Harari doesn't push the domestication of fire as far back as 1.8 million years as Wrangham does but it does note that the chimpanzee brain uses 6% of the body's energy at rest, while according to the article "A human body at rest devotes roughly one-fifth of its energy to the brain". The hypothesis is that only cooking could have provided this boost. Shorter gut, bigger brain. It's a fascinating conjecture. The question is, did we develop sophisticated language before domesticating fire or vice-versa. Perhaps the synthesised creation myths of all the world's cultures and religions could provide a clue?
I loved this article. Stories like this make me feel a weirdly intense connection with everyone. One thing we can all have in common is our evolutionary history and how it made us the beings we are, flaws and all.
Loren Eiseley also focused on the anthropology of fire. This is from the 1950's:<p><a href="https://carrieshmarrie.weebly.com/blog/man-the-firemaker-by-loren-eiseley" rel="nofollow">https://carrieshmarrie.weebly.com/blog/man-the-firemaker-by-...</a><p>also the same thing in a Google Books link: <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=Bg2-Clxqy88C&lpg=PA45&ots=TBV97a_PBn&pg=PA45#v=onepage&f=false" rel="nofollow">https://books.google.com/books?id=Bg2-Clxqy88C&lpg=PA45&ots=...</a>
I'm currently reading <i>Why We Sleep</i> and just finished a chapter on how humans' ancestors came out of the trees and started sleeping on the ground. It's speculated that early humans' use of fire made this non-suicidal - keeping away the big nocturnal predators and also reducing the number of ticks, etc, preying on them.
Cooking helped us to fuel our large brains. May we turn it around and ask: for a given diet and brain size, is the adaptive value of curiosity/creativity to save on calories? Not just by improving our plans, tools and behaviours but by making thinking itself more efficient (in terms of simple wattage).