The History of Fire

9:26Chuck Bryant:I mean, a rare steak is a thing of beauty in and of itself. But, yeah, I don't want to say well done. But, yes, cooked meat is good, too. A cooked turkey leg is way better than a raw turkey leg. Yeah.

9:42Josh Clark:Hey, I've never tested that theory, but I bet you're right.

9:46Chuck Bryant:It's one of those things that you don't even have to try yourself. You just innately know it. And it's from this era.

9:52Josh Clark:Yeah, that's right. gathering after foraging was the next step of sort of the discovery of fire. And that's when humans were like, hey, I have this fire. It may have happened by lightning strike, but I now have it in a little bindle in my hand, or maybe in a log hollow, and I can carry this thing from one place to another now. Or maybe it's just a tree branch if you're a little bit more of a simpleton, like Tuk Tuk was. and now you can transport your fire from one area to the other and you can use that fire to flush prey out or to protect yourself from the saber-toothed tiger or whatever.

10:32Chuck Bryant:Yeah, that's a big one that I hadn't really thought of before but you keep animals at bay because animals are used to wildfires and not going near them so if you're a human or a hominin and you're huddling around a fire the saber-toothed tiger probably isn't going to come attack you right then.

10:47Josh Clark:You never saw Jungle Book?

10:51Chuck Bryant:Oh, very, very long ago. And all I remember is Baloo doing his thing.

10:55Josh Clark:Yeah, the Bear Necessities. Yeah, so great. Still probably my favorite, even among the moderns, my favorite Disney cartoon.

11:03Chuck Bryant:My favorite's long been Robin Hood. That was always my favorite as a kid.

11:07Josh Clark:Yeah, I liked that Robin Hood a lot, but you just can't beat, there's so many bangers in The Jungle Book.

11:12Chuck Bryant:Okay, all right. All right, I'll go with that one. then I'll just stop. I'll throw out my own personal favorite in favor of yours.

11:21Josh Clark:Why would you do that?

11:22Chuck Bryant:I just want to get along.

11:25Josh Clark:Okay. All right. So they're carrying fire around at this point. They may have discovered like a way to actually keep it going better. Like I know on the survival shows, like a lone animal dung is a great, very sort of slow burning way to transport fuel, like a burning cow pie, maybe.

11:43Chuck Bryant:Yeah, for sure. So that's the gathering thing. So we go from foraging, we have no control over it, we just identify that it's something special, to being able to move it around and keep it going. That's the key, thanks to the animal dung discovery, the cow pie. And then we finally reached the point, and this is where all of the archaeologists and anthropologists and all the ologists want to kind of pinpoint, when did humans start making fire ourselves? And we do have evidence of humans using fire very far back, more than a million years ago. But for hundreds of thousands and hundreds of thousands of years between that point and where we are unambiguously making fire ourselves, there's a lot of room for interpretation.

12:33Chuck Bryant:Yes, we were cooking or something or we were using a fire. It's clear that there were humans around this fire, but it's not clear that humans actually made the fire. We may have gathered it. When did we start making fire? That's the big question in archaeology and anthropology.

12:51Josh Clark:That's right. Boy, it sounds like, I know it's early, but it sounds like a perfect place for a little cliffhanger break.

12:57Chuck Bryant:It's what I do.

12:58Josh Clark:All right. We'll be right back, everybody.

13:10Chuck Bryant:Hey, everybody, we're hitting the road again, starting in January 2026, picking up again in April 2026. And eventually, Canada, we'll tell you your dates, too.

13:21Josh Clark:That's right. We're going to do at least three legs. And the first leg is starting out in Denver, Colorado at the Paramount Theater on January 27th. We're going to go back to our beloved Seattle at the Paramount Theater there on the 28th. And then finally, back at Sketchfest on the 29th at the Sydney Goldstein Theater.

13:36Chuck Bryant:Yep. And then April 16th, 17th, and 18th, we're going to be in Madison, Wisconsin, Chicago, Illinois, and Akron, Ohio. And if you're not keeping up with all this or taking notes, don't worry. You can get all the info you need and buy tickets at StuffYouShouldKnow.com. Click on the tour button and thank us later.

13:55Josh Clark:That's right. We can't wait to see everybody again out there on the road. You know Roald Dahl, the writer who thought up Willy Wonka, Matilda, and the BFG. But did you know he was also a spy? Was this before he wrote his stories? It must have been. Our new podcast series, The Secret World of Roald Dahl, is a wild journey through the hidden chapters of his extraordinary, controversial life. His job was literally to seduce the wives of powerful Americans. What? And he was really good at it. You probably won't believe it either. Okay, I don't think that's true. I'm telling you, the guy was a spy.

14:29Josh Clark:Did you know Dahl got cozy with the Roosevelt's, played poker with Harry Truman, and had a long affair with a congresswoman. And then he took his talents to Hollywood, where he worked alongside Walt Disney and Alfred Hitchcock before writing a hit James Bond film. How did this secret agent wind up as the most successful children's author ever? And what darkness from his covert past seeped into the stories we read as kids? The true story is stranger than anything he ever wrote. Listen to The Secret World of Roald Dahl on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

15:00Chuck Bryant:On the Adventures of Curiosity Cove podcast, What if the right fit isn't what everyone expects?

15:06Josh Clark:In the case of the right fit, Ella explores movement, confidence, and belonging and learns that not all strength looks the same. Tennis is powerful, fast, focused, and kind of fun.

15:20Chuck Bryant:Strong swing, Ella! This Women's History Month story introduces kids to women who change sports by trusting themselves and moving differently. A thoughtful episode about identity, courage, and helping kids discover where they truly belong. So it's okay if I'm not quite sure what my thing is yet. It's absolutely okay. When and if you do find a sport you love, you may be the next Gertrude, Tony, or Venus. Listen to Adventures of Curiosity Cove every Monday from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

16:01Josh Clark:Want to learn about a pterosaur and call it pterodactyl? How to take a perfect move with all about fractals. Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, the Lizzy Borden murders and the cannibal runs. Don't explain everything to your brain. Explodes. It's Chuck and Josh. It's stuff you should know. It's stuff you should know. Word up, Jerry. All right, we're back. We don't have a definitive answer, unfortunately. But again, we have a lot of good ideas. As far as those three stages go, they do get a little bit easier to pinpoint a rough timeline. But that foraging stage that we mentioned at first, that's definitely the hardest to kind of lock down in time.

16:35Josh Clark:There is no archaeological record, basically, during that phase. But they do think, and again, this is people just giving their best guess, they do think that Australopithecines, the early humans, may have been foraging around fires. And this is like 4 million-ish years ago? Yeah.

16:53Chuck Bryant:Yeah, for sure. I didn't see why they thought that, but like what the Australopithecus was doing, that made them think that. But I don't know. Maybe it had to do with their other behavior that made it seem like they would have done that. So the gathering phase, like I said, that dates back to about a million years ago, where it's very clear that humans have had a fire somewhere. That it's not possible that like a lightning strike set off a fire in the areas where we found evidence of human habitation and fire together, say, 100 feet from the mouth of a cave. Very difficult for a wildfire to start there.

17:36Chuck Bryant:So that's unambiguous is what they call it. Like evidence that humans were interacting or using fire, putting fire to some controlled use at that point. But it's far from clear whether they actually started that and almost certainly did not a million years ago.

17:54Josh Clark:Yeah. And that can also be a little tricky because sometimes they confuse stuff, stuff that might look like charcoal or ash is some naturally occurring sediment from a cave. Yeah. So, you know, they tried to kind of parse through that stuff over the years. But they have found, you know, sites like there's one and we're going to go through a few of these in a minute, but one called the Wonder Work Cave in South Africa. that they basically have agreed is probably the oldest site of controlled on purpose fire use because they have found burnt bones there. And this is 100 feet into a cave.

18:32Chuck Bryant:Right. That's, again, unambiguous use of human fire. There's also some contenders for when we started making fire ourselves, starting fires. and one's about 780 ,000 years ago. 400 ,000 years seems to be the generally accepted latest date that humans became capable in a widespread fashion of making fire ourselves. So somewhere between a million and 400 ,000 years ago, humans became capable of making fire, starting fires. And I say we talk about some of these different locations that are contenders for all this stuff.

19:13Josh Clark:Well, yeah, there's the one in South Africa that I just mentioned. They have found and been able to date ash from that cave to about a million years ago. But again, we're not positive that that was, you know, ignited by humans or not. And they don't know exactly how the fires were used in that case. But it gets a little better as we move along. The Qasem cave in Israel was discovered about 26 years ago. And that is near Tel Aviv. and this is where they have found the first fireplace basically, the first hearth that dates to about 300 ,000 years. So that's pretty unambiguous.

19:52Chuck Bryant:Yeah, and one of the reasons why they're like, yes, this is a pit because up to that point when they find like use of fire, it's just like kind of spread out. Maybe one fire was held there. This is like layer after layer after layer of fires in the same place. So that's clearly a hearth. There's another one in Israel called Gesher Benat Yaakov. It's in northern Israel. And this is the one where they think that people were potentially starting fires as far back as 780 ,000 years ago. And this would have been Homo erectus, who was the longest-lived hominin. They lived for almost 2 million years.

20:33Chuck Bryant:And they were clever ones, too. They were the first ones to basically take a leap forward in stone tool technology. They also invented Jordache genes. And they know that the Homo erectus were the ones who were making, or at least using this fire 780 ,000 years ago, because they found their characteristic stone tools like hand axes. and they were cooking fish essentially here on the banks of the Jordan River. Carp that were up to like six and a half feet from what I read. And Chuck, I was reading about how they figured out that they were definitely cooking fish and that they weren't just like fish remains that they'd eaten raw and tossed into a fire.

21:12Chuck Bryant:And they tested the fish teeth that had been cooked to see what temperature they'd been exposed to. If it were a high temperature, they probably would have been remains just chucked into the middle of a fire. If it were exposed to a lower temperature, then this probably would have been a controlled roast. And they found the evidence for roasting. So they were cooking fish about 800 ,000 years ago there.

21:33Josh Clark:Yeah, the next one is the Rising Star Cave in South Africa, a very promising cave. And this one is a little controversial in that they do think that some sort of tiny brain species of early human, They were called the Homo Naledi. They think that they built fires in this cave, and this was about 335 ,000 years ago. But other people came along and said, no, I'm not sure if that's when it happened. It might have been other people that came to that cave later. And similar kind of goes for another cave in China, the Zucodian Cave. That one was excavated in the 1920s, and people thought for a long, long time that, Like, hey, here's the oldest hearth, the oldest sort of purposeful fireplace.

22:20Josh Clark:And it goes back a half a million years. But it's kind of gone back and forth since in the 90s, 1990s, that is. They saw evidence of this ash there. And they said, you know, I don't think this is ash, actually. It was what Chuck will talk about later is other organic materials that look like ash. But then later on in the 2010s, other people came back and had other evidence. They said, no, I think they were purpose-built fires here, which, you know, just goes to show kind of how hard it is to really pinpoint this stuff.

22:51Chuck Bryant:Right. Yeah, going back and forth between the 1920s and the 2010s like that, that's like archaeological whiplash.

22:57Josh Clark:Yeah.

22:58Chuck Bryant:So we really need to just kind of also point out here, we're talking about hominins using fire, not homo sapiens. Homo sapiens obviously knew how to use fire and how to make fire, but we almost certainly were not the ones that came up with fire ourselves. We might have learned it actually from some of the other species of humans that were running around at the same time as we were, like Neanderthals. And like I said, there's evidence of other species like Homo erectus using fire to one degree or another as far as like maybe a million years ago. But there's a lot of questions about did every single species of human know how to make fire?

23:44Chuck Bryant:And Neanderthals in particular have been kind of picked on as not necessarily knowing what they were doing with starting fires.

23:53Josh Clark:Yeah, this one has some pretty good arguments going, I think, in both directions. They found evidences of activity in France and like sites in France that they excavated.

24:05Chuck Bryant:Yeah.

24:06Josh Clark:And they, you know, what they found was there were more traces of fire from periods without glaciers than periods that did have glaciers. And it doesn't really track in some ways because you would think that they would, if they could make fire on their own, than they would have done that when it was colder. And also, it makes sense in a way, because in the period where there aren't glaciers, there are going to be more lightning strikes and thunderstorms, and the vegetation's going to be dried out, so they may be using the fire even in the warmer periods because it's just there.

24:40Chuck Bryant:Right, exactly. They also find lots, or they have found in some Neanderthal sites, lots of ash buildup, and not necessarily because this is a very ancient hearth, but because they had to keep the fire going. So it was constantly going because they didn't know how to get it started again if it went out. So yeah, those are pretty good arguments for Neanderthals not being able to make fire. But there are other people who point to other evidence that says like, no, actually Neanderthals knew what they were doing. One of them is that Neanderthals made birch bark pitch, which they used as basically an adhesive, like thousands of years before Homo sapiens were doing that.

25:25Chuck Bryant:And that they're also frequently found with manganese dioxide chunks, this black mineral. And it was usually interpreted as they were using this to like decorate their bodies or maybe even for cave art. Somebody has pointed out that no, actually manganese dioxide is a major component in fireworks and you could use it as a pretty good fire starter. So the jury's out, but for my money, they probably did know how to start fires because Homo sapiens have a very, very long tradition of underestimating Neanderthals and being proven wrong in the end as the science advances.

26:01Josh Clark:Yeah, for sure. And while we don't know, you know, when all this started, we definitely know the how, And it's kind of how modern humans start primitive fires, like without any sort of man-made tools. Percussion methods is, you know, when you're striking that flint off of, you know, each other, like off of a rock, it's going to spark. And, you know, maybe they saw that and thought, hey, that looks a little bit like lightning and gave it a shot. You've got the old fire drill method or any kind of friction method of rubbing something together really, really fast. And that'll get a fire going if you're good.

26:39Chuck Bryant:Yeah, I've heard of both of those, obviously. But fire pistons I had not heard of. Essentially, you take a tube and a piston and put together. They essentially form an airtight, well, coupling, I guess. You put a little bit of tinder, really, really dry, almost powdery or fibrous, like easily combustible material, right? and you put the piston in the tube and you press it really quickly. And that compression of air heats the air just enough that it can actually ignite that tender. Then you use the tender to catch more tender on fire and now you've got a fire started. Like when you look back at some of this stuff, I was watching a video of using bow drills to create fire.

27:27Chuck Bryant:I looked, I was watching a really neat video. there's a YouTube channel called Make It Primitive, and they were making birch pitch with no pots. And when you look at this stuff, they're recreating that very, very ancient people figured out how to do. It's like, how did anyone ever accidentally stumble upon this? Like, I understand we're looking at like the developed endpoint version of this, you know, primitive technology, but I can't even imagine how somebody figured out how to make birch pitch in the first place. What happened in some random fire somewhere that gave somebody the idea to turn that into making pitch?

28:06Josh Clark:Yeah. I mean, I think it's kind of cool. Like, I don't know, maybe someone rubbed their hands together and it got hot and they were like, huh, friction causes heat. And, you know, maybe a thousand years later, that idea became maybe a lot of friction could cause so much heat that something might actually catch on fire. Then they start looking around on, like, a good way to do that. Like, that's how it had to have happened. I just think it's amazing.

28:31Chuck Bryant:Yeah. There was probably a transition period, though, where some poor schmo's hands were bleeding. They rubbed them raw so much trying to start a fire with them before they moved on to wood.

28:42Josh Clark:Yeah, I mean, what I think is amazing is that there's really nothing new on the scene, you know?

28:49Chuck Bryant:Well, they say there's nothing new under the sun, Chuck.

28:51Josh Clark:I guess so.

28:53Chuck Bryant:Do you want to take our second break and come back and talk, I don't know, about the history of fire?

28:58Josh Clark:Yeah, let's do it.

29:09Chuck Bryant:Hey, everybody, we're hitting the road again, starting in January 2026, picking up again in April 2026. And eventually, Canada, we'll tell you your dates, too.

29:20Josh Clark:That's right. We're going to do at least three legs. And the first leg is starting out in Denver, Colorado at the Paramount Theater on January 27th. We're going to go back to our beloved Seattle at the Paramount Theater there on the 28th. And then finally back at Sketch Fest on the 29th at the Sydney Goldstein Theater.

29:35Chuck Bryant:Yep. And then April 16th, 17th, and 18th, we're going to be in Madison, Wisconsin, Chicago, Illinois, and Akron, Ohio. And if you're not keeping up with all this or taking notes, don't worry. You can get all the info you need and buy tickets at stuffyoushouldknow.com. Click on the tour button and thank us later.

29:54Josh Clark:That's right. We can't wait to see everybody again out there on the road. You know Roald Dahl, the writer who thought up Willy Wonka, Matilda, and the BFG. But did you know he was also a spy? Was this before he wrote his stories? It must have been. Our new podcast series, The Secret World of Roald Dahl, is a wild journey through the hidden chapters of his extraordinary, controversial life. His job was literally to seduce the wives of powerful Americans. What? And he was really good at it. You probably won't believe it either. Okay, I don't think that's true. I'm telling you. The guy was a spy.

30:29Josh Clark:Did you know Dahl got cozy with the Roosevelt's? Played poker with Harry Truman. And had a long affair with a congresswoman. And then he took his talents to Hollywood, where he worked alongside Walt Disney and Alfred Hitchcock, before writing a hit James Bond film. How did The Secret Agent wind up as the most successful children's author ever? and what darkness from his covert past seeped into the stories we read as kids. The true story is stranger than anything he ever wrote. Listen to The Secret World of Roald Dahl on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On the Adventures of Curiosity Cove podcast,

31:02Chuck Bryant:what if the right fit isn't what everyone expects? In the case of the right fit, Ella explores movement, confidence, and belonging and learns that not all strength looks the same. Tennis is powerful. Fast, focused, and kind of fun. Strong swing, Ella! This Women's History Month story introduces kids to women who change sports by trusting themselves and moving differently. A thoughtful episode about identity, courage, and helping kids discover where they truly belong. So it's okay if I'm not quite sure what my thing is yet. It's absolutely okay. when, and if you do find a sport you love, you may be the next Gertrude, Tony, or Venus.

31:48Chuck Bryant:At Curiosity Cove. Listen to Adventures of Curiosity Cove

31:51Josh Clark:every Monday from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

32:09Josh Clark:Just Chuck and Josh. There's stuff you should know. Word up, Jerry.

32:16Chuck Bryant:So kind of at the outset, we were talking a little bit about how fire just changed humanity. And there's some specific things that we used it for that helped advance different species, not just Homo sapiens, along. One is heat. Like there's the pretty widely believed consensus is that we could not and we did not move into colder climates, not just Homo sapiens, but all hominins, until we had at least figured out how to move fire from one place to another without it going out. That we just would not have been able to survive in northern latitudes without fire. So that was a huge thing. It allowed us to spread further and further away from the tropics.

33:03Josh Clark:Yeah, for sure. And once you got out of the tropics, it allowed you to spread further and further wherever you were because it provided light. You could explore those caves. You could explore the darkness of the world around you. So I know I've said this before about camping. And, you know, when I go to the family camp, sometimes we'll take people that have aversions to camping. And we have some solar power there and string lights that light up the camp at night. And I have learned firsthand that what I think is going on when people say they don't like camping is that they don't like the darkness once you leave that campfire.

33:43Josh Clark:because people that say they don't like camping have had a great time at the family camp because it's lit up all around you. And they've said, man, I feel at ease here and I'm never at ease in the woods. I'm like, that's because you can see around you. It's the dark you're afraid of or whatever you think is in the dark.

33:57Chuck Bryant:I feel like you're talking about Hodgman right now, aren't you?

34:01Josh Clark:You know, Hodgman had a great time at the camp.

34:04Chuck Bryant:Oh, I'm sure he did. Hodgman has a good time wherever he goes, but I can also, he's a city boy. Yeah.

34:10Josh Clark:Yeah, I let him sleep in my little camper, the little one-bed camper. Yeah, we snuggled up.

34:16Chuck Bryant:That is very sweet and completely unsurprising.

34:19Josh Clark:Yeah, it was sweet. It was a good snug. And we also made tools, John and I did, with our fire, which is something that the early humans did.

34:28Chuck Bryant:So I'm a real birchbark pitch fan now.

34:32Josh Clark:Sounds like it, yeah.

34:33Chuck Bryant:This is what it's for. So it's a tarry adhesive that you make by basically burning and condensing birch bark. Okay. Which I love birch trees in the first place. Pando is almost a birch. It's a quaking aspen, but they're close. They're similar. I just love that bark. So if you just, again, go watch Make It Primitive and the way that they make birch bark pitch. but you you take this stuff this tari stuff and you say take an arrow there's an arrowhead in your right hand there's a shaft in your left hand there's a string of twine in your teeth because both your other hands are occupied and you wind the twine around the arrowhead to get it to to stay on the shaft of the arrow and then after it's on nice and tight then you put a bunch of pitch around it and man, it really holds it fast.

35:29Chuck Bryant:Now you've got an arrow that's going to really do the job, all thanks to your birch bark pitch. Although let's also give a hand for Twine too.

35:38Josh Clark:You know, buddy, you are a hair's breadth away from being a big fan of Alone, the show that I've touted for a decade. I don't know why you're not watching it because all this stuff thrills you.

35:49Chuck Bryant:Do they talk in it though? Is there dialogue and narration? Because on Make It Primitive,

35:53Josh Clark:they just do their thing they don't talk uh i mean they put people alone in the woods with a camera so they're you know they're talking some but there's not like mike rowe doesn't come on and say what jane is doing is making an arrow gotcha yeah um okay i maybe i'll give it a shot i don't

36:14Chuck Bryant:know why i'm resistant to it either chuck i think it's just reality television i have an aversion to it in general.

36:20Josh Clark:Yeah. I mean, I guess it's reality. To me, reality TV, there's stuff like this and Top Chef that are like real things. And then there's, you know, people, the shows where they just pit people against each other to argue and fight. Like those are two different things.

36:34Chuck Bryant:For sure. For sure. Yeah. Agreed. But yeah. So I think that's the only reason I'm just like not diving in feet first.

36:43Josh Clark:Well, the real question is, do you prefer to cook your meat or smoke your meat.

36:47Chuck Bryant:Do I have to choose? No, you don't. Well, there's a question, Chuck, about whether people started heating their meat to cook it or to smoke it. I'm a smoker. I'm on team smoker, to put it in a Taylor Swift kind of way.

37:04Josh Clark:As for what you prefer or what you think they were doing?

37:06Chuck Bryant:What I think they were doing. I like smoked meat, but it is so bad for you that I just, I eat it sparingly.

37:14Josh Clark:Yeah, same here. So yeah, I mean, the idea is that when they hunted a big, large megafauna that they would have needed to do something with that meat. You know, there's too much meat to even cook and eat all at once, even if everyone's super hungry.

37:31Chuck Bryant:Right.

37:32Josh Clark:So it seems like smoking meat may have been the first thing. How they figured that out, I have no idea.

37:38Chuck Bryant:It's all just conjecture. It just makes sense, essentially. It's just from the size of the animal, no band of hunter-gatherers as far as the size that we thought or think they are. They couldn't possibly have eaten like a woolly mammoth in one sitting.

37:52Josh Clark:Yeah, but how do they know they didn't just like eat what they could and the rest went bad?

37:56Chuck Bryant:Because humans have a long history of not being wasteful and we still aren't today. I don't know. That's a great question, man. That's basically the argument against that.

38:09Josh Clark:Well, maybe at some of these sites, would they be able to tell if it was just bones or if it was like former meat?

38:16Chuck Bryant:Yeah, there's the tool marks for like getting meat off of the bone. There's teeth marks. All right, so there you go. Yeah, but that doesn't, yeah, I guess, yeah, if you looked at the whole skeleton and there was just like one leg that was eaten and the rest of it was there, yeah. I think, yeah, I'm not sure what team I'm on now. I'm in my confused era.

38:37Josh Clark:Well, we're both on Team Hearth because I know we both enjoy good fire. And the idea that people have been sort of really interacting with fire, I know we've said that some people say a million years. It really became widespread of around 400 ,000-ish years ago.

38:55Chuck Bryant:Yeah.

38:55Josh Clark:And that's when we really can have some pretty good archaeological evidence that there are hearths all over the place. Yeah. People are building permanent setups or at least semi-permanent setups where they would live. And the hearth was a big, big part of that.

39:12Chuck Bryant:Oh, yeah, for sure. You wouldn't just use a hearth to like cook necessarily. There were different kinds of hearths that were designed to do different kinds of things. Like you would use the different hearths to fire clay pottery than you would to maybe cook that one leg of mastodon, you know. And then, yeah, you might have a different hearth for sitting around the campfire and socializing and taking shrooms.

39:33Josh Clark:I wonder if you could cook in a kiln.

39:37Chuck Bryant:I don't know. That'd be interesting. It'd be like dry sous vide. Yeah.

39:41Josh Clark:So like you're kilning your or whatever, curing your pot. You might as well throw that turkey leg in there and double dip.

39:49Chuck Bryant:See what happens. Yeah. I'll bet it would not look right. It might be fine taste wise, but it would not look right. Yeah.

39:57Josh Clark:Emily's getting into pottery. Maybe we'll see. I'll try it out.

40:00Chuck Bryant:Oh, yeah, do. Let me know how it goes. I'll ruin her kiln. Yeah. She's going to be like, my kiln smells like turkey. Sorry. One of the things that I thought was pretty cool is that fire actually helped progress humans from age to age. It was the reason we transitioned from the Stone Age to the Metal Ages, starting with the Copper Age. We learned how to use fire to smelt copper, and then we started creating better and better tools from there. It was all thanks to fire. The whole thing, all of human prehistory swung on our use of fire right there.

40:36Josh Clark:Yeah, for sure. And they've also got evidence that perhaps, well, not evidence, I guess, conjecture, again, that it has played a role in human biology. Right. because humans have a gene mutation that we developed after fire, seemingly, that made us less sensitive to smoke inhalation. Like, once fire started to be a thing, people would stand around it and start coughing and be like, well, this is no good. So they would stand back a little bit. But eventually the AHR gene, which helps us regulate our response to carcinogens and would smoke, came along. That mutation came along in that gene. So it's a pretty clear sign, I think.

41:17Chuck Bryant:Yeah, and apparently it's just found in Homo sapiens. You can't find it in like Neanderthal DNA or Homo erectus DNA. So it's like it just kind of goes to show you just how important fire is. Our bodies actually evolved to sit around fires better. We also learned to shout, I hate rabbits, to get the smoke from coming your way. I wonder where that came from. I don't know. It makes zero sense. I bet someone knows. Another one, Chuck, that's, this makes sense, although I hadn't really thought about it before, are circadian rhythms changed. Humans, as far as animals go, we're the most alert in the evening.

41:53Chuck Bryant:Most animals are not the most alert in the evening. They're most alert earlier in the day. And the idea is that is because our interactions with fire allowed us to stay up much later. And hence our circadian rhythms changed and adjusted likewise.

42:08Josh Clark:That's right. And then finally, that all sounds good when you're sitting around the fire talking about hunting the mastodon. But that also means if tuk-tuk is sick, tuk-tuk is getting other people sick. So ancient humans might have, you know, spread disease a little more readily because people are just hanging out more.

42:25Chuck Bryant:Yeah, I was reading a study that they said that tuberculosis emerged in humanity about the same time we started using fire. like being able to control it, not necessarily make it ourselves, but at least to move it around. And yeah, huddling together helps a contagious disease spread much more easily because not only are you closer around a fire, you're also probably in like a rock shelter too. So tuberculosis loves fires and rock shelters. Everybody knows that.

43:00Josh Clark:That's right. And by the way, I like Contagible. I think I'm going to go with that from now on.

43:04Chuck Bryant:Thank you. Thanks for that. I appreciate that, man. This is why you and I are so close. You're just supportive. What else you got, Chuck? I got nothing else. All right. I don't have anything else either. That's the history of fire. That's everything there is to know about fire. So don't even try to look for more. And since I said that, obviously it's time for listener mail.

43:28Josh Clark:I'm going to call this follow-up to Gold Standard. Hey, guys. Very much enjoyed the recent episode on the Gold Standard, but I have a small correction. Womp womp. In the book, those ruby slippers, and I guess they're talking about the Wizard of Oz, yes?

43:40Chuck Bryant:Yeah, remember in the Gold Standard episode, we were talking about how it was an allegory for the debate over the gold standard and the silver standard and all that, and we're like, I guess there was the ruby standard and blah, blah, blah, and this is what they're writing it about. So in the book, those ruby slippers were actually silver and were meant to represent the silver standard, not a ruby standard.

44:01Josh Clark:There was a charged debate going on in the States at the time on whether we should use the gold or silver standard, which was the allegory you discussed in the episode. The movie changes silver slippers to ruby, I believe, to show off the new Technicolor technology. Parenthetical, I'm no film buff, so please correct me if I'm mistaken. Hey, that sounds good to me, Liz.

44:21Chuck Bryant:Yeah.

44:22Josh Clark:Thank you guys for what you do. I'm going to see you live in Akron. All right, Liz from Cleveland. Can't wait to see you there. And that is a great email.

44:30Chuck Bryant:It is a great email. Thanks a lot, Liz. And Liz is among a handful of other people who wrote in to tell us that, which made the whole thing make way more sense. So nuts to Hollywood and cheers to the original version of something.

44:45Josh Clark:That's right. Ruby standard.

44:47Chuck Bryant:If you want to be like Liz and get in touch with us and tell us something we don't know, we love that kind of thing. You can send it in an email to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.

45:01Josh Clark:Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

45:18Chuck Bryant:Hey, everybody. We're hitting the road again. starting in January 2026, picking up again in April 2026, and eventually, Canada, we'll tell you your dates, too.

45:28Josh Clark:That's right. We're going to do at least three legs, and the first leg is starting out in Denver, Colorado, at the Paramount Theater on January 27th. We're going to go back to our beloved Seattle at the Paramount Theater there on the 28th, and then finally back at Sketchfest on the 29th at the Sidney Goldstein Theater.

45:44Chuck Bryant:Yep, and then April 16th, 17th, and 18th, we're going to be in Madison, Wisconsin, Chicago, Illinois, in Akron, Ohio. And if you're not keeping up with all this or taking notes, don't worry. You can get all the info you need and buy tickets at stuffyoushouldknow.com. Click on the tour button and thank us later.

46:02Josh Clark:That's right. We can't wait to see everybody again out there on the road.

46:08Josh Clark:Peace to the planet. Charlamagne Tha God here. And listen, we are back. The Black Effect Podcast Festival is back in Atlanta on April 25th at Pullman Yard. Yeah. And the full lineup is nuts. We got the Grits and Eggs podcast We'll be right back.

46:50Josh Clark:podcast festival. Don't play yourself, okay? Pull up.

46:57Chuck Bryant:Then she says, have you seen a photo of my son? And I'm like, who is this person?

47:03Josh Clark:Welcome to the Boys and Girls podcast.

47:05Chuck Bryant:Arranged marriage is basically a reality show and you're auditioning for your soulmate. And who's judging? Only your entire family? I sacrificed myself to this ancient tradition, hoping to find love the right way. And instead, I found chaos, comedy, and a lot of cringe.

47:23Josh Clark:Listen to Boys and Girls on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.