Tag Archives: fire
Does firelight influence sleep quality?
I tweeted yesterday to David Samson that Asher Rosinger is making me look bad, so all the collaborations that make him so productive. Of course, I’m not really competing with Asher. We just profiled Asher’s productivity on a recent Sausage … Continue reading
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
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
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
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
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
