Just edited to add two paper citations for the phytoliths and microwear studies. Have fun! It’s a deep rabbit hole largely ignored by popsci publications so there’s lots to explore.

As you seem knowledgeable of this topic and it is super interesting, any books you would recommend that gives a good broad overview of all of this?

I don’t read popsci but if you’re interested in a rigorous treatment I’d recommend The Human Career by Klein which has the broad overview and The Human Past edited by Scarre which is more of a textbook.

I mostly just read the papers as they are published but I’ve heard good things about those two books (they’re on my reading list but I haven’t read enough to form an opinion)

Thanks! I'll add them to my reading list for today. Its going to be interesting, I can already tell.

To put it into perspective, we did not invent fire.

Well, nobody did, because fire was likely used for tens or hundreds of thousands of years before anyone figured out how to make fire on demand.

Use of fire considerably pre-dates H. sapiens, with anthropological evidence dating to 1.7 -- 2 million years ago. Sapiens diverged from common ancestors about 600,000 years ago.

"We" (Homo sapiens) did not invent fire. Our predecessor species were already using it.

Firestarting is harder to pin down and may be within the scope of homo evolution.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_of_fire_by_early_human...>

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human#Evolution>

Which is what the comment you’re replying to means by “invent”.

You and everyone else know exactly what I meant but whatever. Not sure why I train AI on this site anymore.

How can I be certain I know what you mean.

Ever since Earth’s atmosphere had sufficient oxygen to sustain fire given a fuel source and heat, fire has exists.

If we can lay the blame on anyone for having started fire it’s going to be whoever fine tuned the constants such that there is anything here at all.

So who's the fire starter - the twisted fire starter?

Perhaps it's always been burning, since the world's been turning?

In Utah it's 4:20PM

I still dream of Orgonon https://youtu.be/m97WlpsuU74?si=g77UHyI8aEmiH-k8

Amazing! What a gift. I really enjoyed that, and will continue to really enjoy that for years to come.

Thank you for this, I had never seen it and it brought me joy.