I stayed up the other night (despite being very tired) to watch the premier episode of National Geograpic’s new series “Origins”, entitled “Spark of Civilization”, which promised to enlighten us as to the importance and origins of our use of fire as a species, a subject I find fascinating.
I had some reservations, not long ago I was fairly critical of National Geograpic’s series Mars, which could have, should have been inspiring, but instead was an unremittingly depressing view of planet colonization that in the end became entirely politically-correct and predictable feminist propaganda.
I shouldn’t have bothered. They were very big on “importance”, not so much on “origins”.
Okay. Fire important. Got that. I think most of their audience probably had that concept at least vaguely understood going in, I’m not sure they needed an entire hour on that one single point.
That’s what we got, though. Fire necessary to civilization. Fire necessary to make bronze. Fire necessary to make iron. Fire necessary to make steel. Fire necessary to make rockets. I honestly had a lot of trouble staying awake.
Worse, they were very big on production value, not so much on content.
The entire story of the origin of hominid control of fire was about fifteen minutes, not counting commercials, so probably seven or eight minutes of real content. This included vignettes of creatures apparently barely able to clothe themselves by cutting and crudely stitching skins into ponchos that are somehow using a highly-evolved mechanism (the hand drill) to start a fire, which miraculously skips the ember stage entirely and causes tinder to burst into flame.
That’s generally the level of “science” one would expect in television dating from the 1950s through the 1970s. I sort of thought we had gone beyond that now.
They did include very brief statements by Richard Wrangham, one sentence on the benefits of not having to chew all day. That at least is getting closer to the heart of the subject and I had hopes we might pick up on it as a thread, but it was over in seconds.
The other authority being presented
It’s worse because this is actually a very exciting time in the exploration of this very subject. There is a lot of current research, a lot of fascinating and contradictory theories and new discoveries being made right now, almost none of which was even mentioned.
There was no mention of the probable three stages of hominid fire use, 1. Exploiting the results of wildfire (which chimpanzees do presently), 2. Learning to feed, control the spread of and keep a fire alive without being able to start one from scratch, and 3. Being able to start and control fire at will.
There was no mention that different scientists propose different dates for hominid control of fire, varying by millions of years. No mention of the connected question as to how far fire was responsible for evolution having created our current physical form. No mention of how critical cooked food is to our survival, and was to our subsequent evolution. There was no mention of which method of fire creation may have been first (even, most broadly, whether it is more likely to have been friction or spark), not even a mention of which species of hominid, Neanderthal or Cro-Magnon, was first in doing so. No mention of the amount of foresight necessary to prepare and carry the tools and materials needed to create fire, including the important factor of using the products of one fire to prepare to create the next, and the tie-in to the myth of Prometheus, who supposedly stole fire from the gods to give to humans and whose very name means, literally, “foresight”.
Stretching a bit into improbability, they might have even mentioned the newly-discovered possible Neanderthal use of manganese dioxide (as a mineral) in firestarting, or the possible antiquity of “wool skating”/the Rudiger Roll friction fire-starting technique. Okay, that’s expecting too much from television, but it wasn’t impossible. There are pretty-much-unknown blogs with zero budget that have covered such things, it’s not like National Geographic doesn’t have the resources.
They could easily have spent the entire hour on the origins of controlled fire and had a fascinating show. The show is called “Origins”, they might have considered it. Instead we got a few minutes, with the rest of the time devoted to the one concept: fire important through history.
Who would have guessed?
Basically, the entire show was targeted toward kids, or at least those who had never given the importance of fire any thought at all, with lots of flashy jump-cuts and visual drama to keep their interest, but very little real content.
Disappointing. Just as in the case of the series “Mars”, it could have been so much more.
It could have been good.
– Robert the Wombat