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

mitch_mckee said:
From the first known uses of a hand axe to people figuring out how to tie the damn thing onto a stick and make a weapon was a long, long time. Learning is slow and over a period of hundreds of thoudands of years we have time for random events happen repeatedly. Maybe that was the way it was with fire. Starting a fire with sparks takes less knowledge that figuring out how to spin a stick fast enough and long enough to get a spark. The woods have to be right. One must be persitient (implying that the person was sure of success). Even if rubbing sticks together was the firwst method, the people had to have an edged tool to shape everyting.

In the scheme of things, no edgeded tools, no fire, no metal, in that order.
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thats what i posted on page one. without stone tools we wouldn't have been able to get the massive amounts of protein/meat to grow that large brain to be able to use fire.
made it a lot easier to cut off chunks of dead animal to get away to a safer place to eat it. i'm guessing the weapon part was an after thought, a long stick would have been safer than a sharp rock with a large carnivore, some things haven't changed, distance is still our friend.
 
CascadeSam said:
If fire is a tool then so is sunlight. With sunlight to see by, man can go out and hunt, build mud huts, see wild cave women to capture, and run away from big bad animals ready to pounce.
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These are not comparable things.

This is like comparing a knife to a strip miner.
 
Nice thread, got me surfin' about Homo Erectus and fire. I was going by a couple documentaries I saw on this kind of thing.

Seems that there is proof of controlled fire 400k yrs. ago but many scientists think it went back much further. There is no irrefutable proof of this, so it is just a theory. The scientific method (more later) requiring us to back up theories quite well before accepting them.

Really doesn't matter for what we are saying here. Homo Erectus controlled fire and so did Neanderthals. We evolved with fire effecting our dentition and diet.

I think that "control" of fire was an incremental thing, not a sudden development. Wildfires abound and it is not hard to think of our ancestors "stealing" this "magic" stuff to preserve as long as possible, trading with other groups for it and the like, but that's my theory.

Neanderthals and Homo Erectus had more technology than previously thought. Animals use tools more than previously thought. They say a chimp has the intelligence of a 4(?) yr old. A kid knows when things are sharp.

One of the articles I've read since reading this thread called what Homo Erectus had a "15 minute culture". Tools were made, fire was controlled at some point, but with limited verbal skills to communicate concepts it remained very static. Like a chimp might show its kids how to get ants with a stick, but with no oral tradition to pass down and build knowledge things remained much the same for eons.

Our society leapt forward with oral tradition. It took another leap forward with written recording of knowledge. And, with the advent of the scientific method to prove or disprove validity of this knowledge, took another exponential leap forward.

Still, I like the beer hypothesis a lot.
 
I mean, even Homo Habilus had some pretty advanced tools.



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The smallest knife edge has to be the laser surgical scapel. The largest must be that crane hoisted edge used to shear B-52 wings off in the boneyard so the Soviets could see the destruction from their spy satelites, proving that we obeyed the SALT treaties. Fire ranges from a glowing ember that can be nurtured into a campfire to the 10 mile diameter fireball a Soviet 20+ Megaton H-bomb would produce. I'll go with fire. Besides, how would Trog the caveman ever develop m390 steel without fire? "Ugh... flint tool have serrated edge... equivalent to M4!"

Stainz
 
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