Edged tool vs. fire...which is Mankind's most important tool?

macmiddlebrooks

macmiddlebrooks

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I like to look at many things in a anthropological perspective. I believe that the jury is still somewhat out on which was used first..edged tools or the controlled use of fire. It seems like they may be relatively close (evolutionary speaking...couple 10's of thousands of years?). I'm going with edged tool due to it's overwhelming applications in my eyes, what do you guys/gals think? Either way, I think these two things' importance explains why I seem to be so drawn to learn more about them to a degree that I've spent a ton of $$ on knives and spent countless hours researching and experimenting with fire starting methods.
 
Far and away Fire. there is nothing we have that is manufactured or made that dosent involve fire some whare in the prosess.
 
It's one of those things where I don't think you can say which is more important. Kind of like the heart vs the brain.

For example, collecting firewood, how possible was that without an edged tool? Perhaps man had to use an edge tool before he even could create a usable fire.

Then, we need the edge tool to prepare and cut food... However cooking it allowed us to get more protein that we could have otherwise.

I think of it like this... What couldn't we have done with fire that we could do with edge tools? To a certain extent you kind of realize that without edge tools, we could probably find ways to control fire to be useful, but it wouldn't be nearly as easy without an edged tool.

I think without the edged tool, our mastery of fire would have taken much longer to develop, and wouldn't have been able to sustain ourselves long enough to learn those skills.

So long story short, without edged tools, fire wouldn't be nearly as useful.
 
scrapers and edged tools came much earlier than the controlled use of fire, So I'm going to say edged tools!

Also, a lot of people don't realize that the advent of the edged tool along with its application didn't just allow original man to cut things. It forged the concept of manipulation of materials. Where a stick used to be a stick, now a stick could be manipulated to become a spear. Once man realized this crucial concept, the entire game changed. All of these objects and materials that could be used as they occur naturally could now be shaped and changed to fit specific functions, or objects that served no purpose could now be changed to serve a function.
 
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I would say that fire is more important to modern society where cutting implements would have been more important in ancient societies.

The two do kind of build on each other so I doubt you could put one over the other in importance.
 
I'd say fire. You don't need an edged tool to gather material for a fire but you need fire to cook what you gather with an edged tool. As far as cutting up the food, you already come equipped with edged tools - your teeth.
 
Fire, you can still rip, tear, and break to separate master, but heat from fire isn't something we can do otherwise while sitting naked in a cave.
 
Also when the temperature drops, you'll die from hypothermia quicker than you'll die from starvation.
 
Aren't we talking about Mankind's most important tool? Alot of points being made are concerned with a survival situation only. Mannkid built the Great Wall of China and sent a man to the moon. We haven't been sitting in a cave for the past few hundred thousand years only gathering firewood, hunting animals and cooking them.
 
Hunter gatherers were opportunistic and would gather, store resources. My (guess) is that food resources and tools would be easier to acquire than fire, particularly if you acquired fire opportunistically, say from a natural event and didn't have the technology to create it. So if you lived say by the ocean and had a relatively assured food supply, fire and climate would be a more critical factor than food processing tools. I say fire.... as it would be harder to obtain for the first humans.
 
Joshua J. said:
I would say that fire is more important to modern society where cutting implements would have been more important in ancient societies.

The two do kind of build on each other so I doubt you could put one over the other in importance.
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Our modern society still uses plenty of cutting tools, these days they are now part of industry. Individual homes may not need cutting tools as much, but our meals still get butchered, our veggies still get sliced and diced. Our pre-packaged world just does the processing for us, often times with cutting tools involved at some point.

But, I do agree, fire and edged tools go together. Once we learned to manipulate, I'm sure we kept going, and are still going.
 
When man discovered he could make a sharp point on a stick by burning it in fire, he had his first spear. This spear allowed him to become a hunter rather than a scavenger. The first knives were merely flint chips but still quite adequate for skinning and cutting up prey. This allowed him to make rudimentary coverings. Prior to being able to do this, man would have had to winter in warmer climes. Fire and clothing allowed him to expand his range and "winter" over. Both fire and a cutting edge were indispensable to man's development, but fire had to come first.
 
I would say both. For starters, tools/weapons allowed us to obtain fresh meat pretty much at will and fire later allowed us to cook it and make it much easier to metabolize. I would also say that we did not truly "discover" fire until we figured out how to start a fire using tools so we didn't have to wait for lighting to strike some tree and hope that we could keep the fire going until the next storm. Without fire, we would have no cooking, but without weapons, edged or otherwise, we would still be fragile creatures with big heads eating bugs, berries and maybe carrion and teetering on the brink of extinction if we had not already died out.. Some now theorize that having that abundance of easy to digest animal protein is one of major things that sped up the growth and increased complexity of our brain. Remember that while some humans had been eating wild cereals like barley for thousands of years, we didn't start actually farming it until 10-11,000 years ago in place like Turkey and that took a long time to spread to other parts.
Both have had a big part in other evolutionary changes that we don't even think about. Our teeth changed to reflect our more omnivorous eating habits, but the ALIGNMENT of our teeth also changed from meeting edge to edge to overlapping when we no longer really needed to use them as "tools." and probably reduced the size of our canines compared to other primates because we no longer needed them as "weapons" I have read articles that said that our evolution accelerated exponentially once we started and I read one today that says that continues to accelerate at an ever greater pace. Now that most people have unfettered access to nutritionally dense food in great quantities, we are getting bigger and I don't just mean fatter. Early modern humans were smaller and needed perhaps 1/3-1/2 as much food as Neanderthal to survive. Today, we are still pretty efficient, but the even greater intake of protein has caused even "historically short" people like the Japanese to get taller.
 
macmiddlebrooks said:
I like to look at many things in a anthropological perspective. I believe that the jury is still somewhat out on which was used first..edged tools or the controlled use of fire. It seems like they may be relatively close (evolutionary speaking...couple 10's of thousands of years?). I'm going with edged tool due to it's overwhelming applications in my eyes, what do you guys/gals think? Either way, I think these two things' importance explains why I seem to be so drawn to learn more about them to a degree that I've spent a ton of $$ on knives and spent countless hours researching and experimenting with fire starting methods.
Click to expand...

stone tools and controlled use of fire is(from what I've read) almost a million years apart,(may only be 500,000 years) but no where near close.
first stone tool manufacturing evidence. (i know its wikipedia, but this ain't university either)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_tools

first evidence of the use of fire or control of fire
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_of_fire_by_early_humans

if it wasn't for the use of edged tools we wouldn't have had the ability to get the large amounts of meat/protein to grow that big brain that let us use/control fire.
they weren't making arrow heads or spear points they were hacking off chunks of meat so they could take it away and eat it with out getting eaten by all the large carnivores that were roaming around.
wouldn't have taken long to figure out that sitting there beside a dead animal ripping and tearing and gnawing at it was a death wish. YMMV but that's my humble opinion and it seems the opinion of a bunch of archaeologists.
 
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