by D wiltshire 9 Replies latest jw friends
Prehistoric Man Discovers Fire and Beyond!
I think that is a nice title.
Just try to think back to the time he(MAN) learned to make it.
Was that the time he was given a higher consciousness?
I wonder if that is true?
And what are some other things that happened latter, that shows his biological evolution of his brain?
If someone lived a trillion X longer than you, and had a billion X more reasoning ability would he come to the same conclusions as you?
Lets say 100,000 or so years ago man invented how to make fire. This was a real big break thru, now he could see much better at night with artificial light, cook his food, use it too scare away an enemy, keep warm, and many other uses.
When he looked up at the stars at that time what do you think he thought they were? Little camp fires in the sky that were not close enought to see very good?
If someone lived a trillion X longer than you, and had a billion X more reasoning ability would he come to the same conclusions as you?
dw,
When he looked up at the stars at that time what do you think he thought they were? Little camp fires in the sky that were not close enought to see very good?
Interesting thought. I remember Carl Sagan speculated along exactly those lines in the "Cosmos" TV series.
- Jan
--
- "How do you write women so well?" - "I think of a man and I take away reason and accountability." (Jack Nicholson in "As Good as it Gets")
Jan,
You caught me. That's were I got the thought.
I've been veiwing these videos on the cosmos anytime I see a new one at the libriary.
I'm impressed by his logic.
If someone lived a trillion X longer than you, and had a billion X more reasoning ability would he come to the same conclusions as you?
dw,
I wacthed the Cosmos series when I was a kid. I was utterly impressed, even as a dub at the time. There and then I decided I wanted to be an historian. Alas, dubdom meant that university education was not an option. But I never forgot, and I got back to it.
I credit Carl Sagan's enthusiasm for the natural world and human history for making me curious about understanding the world, and for -- later -- making me realize that scientific skepticism was the tool of choice for getting there.
- Jan
--
- "How do you write women so well?" - "I think of a man and I take away reason and accountability." (Jack Nicholson in "As Good as it Gets")
personally, i find that a bit unlikely. but it would be very interesting if they did. then bronze age man with his developed theology and astrology mightve looked down on the primitive and archaic stone age 'campfires in the sky' notions that were actually not far off from the truth.
i wonder when the first hominid was able to communicate in primitive language to another hominid the concept of 'why'
mox
I don't think it happened all at once like that. Primitive Man would have discovered the myriad uses for fire gradually, building his knowledge of it in the same way we develop our technology today. We may be more advanced, but the methods of learning haven't changed since we left the ocean 2 billion years ago.
That, or his tail just caught on fire and didn't go out. NOBODY KNOWS! ;)
The earlier in the forenoon you take the sun bath, the greater will be the beneficial effect, because you get more of the ultra-violet rays, which are healing. - The Golden Age
I'm reading "Guns, Germs, and Steel" right now by Jared Diamond and it's facinating. It goes into human evolution and the progress of human civilization over the last 11,000 years on all of the inhabited continents. It even dables into how humans spread throughout the whole earth (baring a couple of places) from our humble ape-like beginings until around 11,000 years ago. It didn't really get into the discovery/invention of fire, but it does get into where and when plant and animal domestication started and why some humans never started agriculture (such as aboriginal Australians).
From then on it goes on to show reasons why certain populations of humans continued to spread and form more complex hierarchical societies, while others continued on with hunter-gatherer societies that were all but destroyed by the former. I wonder if his earlier book "The Third Chimpanzee" goes into early human evolution more and covers the taming of fire?
rem
PS: DW, when I saw you talk about campfires in the sky I was thinking, "Man, we've got another Carl Sagan here!" :)
"We all do no end of feeling, and we mistake it for thinking." - Mark Twain
i also think the consesus is that man learned to harness fire caused by lightning strikes or natural means before he learned how to make it himself. perhaps thats why you wrote it 'discovery/invention'
im just finishing up 'In the footsteps of Eve - The mysteries of human origins' by lee r berger myself. he does a nice job of fleshing out the fossils with speculative accounts of life from the viewpoint of primitive man and also fleshing out the science of paleoanthropology with accounts of the politics and personalities involved.
mox
I would just love to be able to get into the human mind back at the time, the making of fire was discovered, and just be able to understand how they reasoned in those days.
Of coarse since man was spred out all over a good portion of the earth they must have discovered it at different times and in different ways.
I would think the discovery of how to make fire back then must have been a big big step for man.
What next the wheel, maybe that was even before fire.
I would think that around the discovery of fire man was already looking at the sky and woundering. I would even bet he got a sort of good feeling just looking at it.
If someone lived a trillion X longer than you, and had a billion X more reasoning ability would he come to the same conclusions as you?
