Comment on Who discovered/"invented" fire?
shalafi@lemmy.world 5 days agoThat last question is the most interesting to me. I guess it doesn’t take much intuition to realize that rubbing things together makes them hot. Rub your arm really fast.
Still, watching experienced woodsmen starting a fire from scratch is an education. Even the best struggle.
Zonetrooper@lemmy.world 5 days ago
It really is an interesting question, yes! Fires started by frictional heating are pretty uncommon in nature, but early humans could pretty readily see that objects placed near a fire would begin to smolder and burn just from radiant heat.
It really depends on when we were able to take intellectual leap of realizing that all heat is equivalent, and fire is not a prerequisite of making new fire.