Tag Archives: fire

Fire Up Your Hearth: Relax & Stay Warm (While Being Energetically Inefficient)

My lab & I have presented on & written about fireside relaxation so many times by this point that I’m running out of clever titles. However, now that our first paper has finally been published &, as it happens, at … Continue reading

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Cognitive Evolution via Campfire Stories

A fantastic analysis of fireside conversations among Ju/’hoansi Bushmen collected over the course of four decades (1970s-2000s) was recently published by Polly Wiessner in PNAS Early Edition (“Embers of society: Firelight talk among the Ju/’hoansi Bushmen“—thanks to Daniel Lende & … Continue reading

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Manning a perpetual fire was linked to language & social network development

The December 2012 issues of Smithsonian Magazine had a fire theme, & archaeologist Thomas Wynn contributed a short piece on the influence of fire in the evolution of the human mind.  He briefs the work of three researchers doing work … Continue reading

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Hominid Use of Fire is at Least 1MYO

The antiquity of the purposive hominid use of fire continues to be pushed back according to a study released earlier this year by Berna et al. in PNAS. Analyses of material at the Wonderwerk Cave, Northern Cape province, South Africa … Continue reading

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Wrangham’s “Catching Fire” and Selection for Calmness

Several years back sociologist James McClenon speculated in a 1997 article in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion that selection for prosocial calmness took place in Homo erectus when they started manipulating fire. I took issue with this, … Continue reading

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