Bread, Fire and the Fireplace
Ever hear the phrase, “That’s the best thing since sliced bread?” It got me thinking. Sliced bread has been with us for a relatively short period of time (it was ninety-eight years ago, in 1928, that the first mechanical breadslicer was invented by Otto Frederick Rohwedder), but that’s nothing compared to the first great inventions of the world, generally thought to be the wheel and the use of fire. More than one species of humans have used fire to cook their food and warm up on a cold night in the Stone Age, around two hundred to four hundred thousand years ago. There’s evidence of the use of fire much earlier as well, but it’s the controlled use of fire that was the great leap forward. Think of the early humans, Homo sapiens and the various subspecies, Homo sapiens idaltu (the “elder wise human”), Homo neanderthalensis (extinct now thirty thousand years) and Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, diverging from each other some five hundred thousand years ago, giving rise eventually to our first evidence for the common ancestor of all humans now on the planet some two hundred thousand years ago. Somewhere in that time, these ancestors witnessed fire falling from the sky in the form of lightning, they saw it catch trees on fire, and they eventually learned how to keep the fire going, but not yet how to start it. Then, in this distant past, one or more of these ancestors (because ideas never seem to arise from a single source), figured out how to create fire on the ground, using stones. That must have seemed like a miracle then, probably sparking, too, the origins of the myth of Prometheus, stealing fire from the gods and bringing it to the Earth.
Over time, fire technology grew, with early humans placing stones around the fire to create a hearth, protecting the flames, until at last, the hearth fireplace was eventually born, a place around which we would one day all break our bread…. Of course, the next big invention after fire was the Wheel. Some archaeologists say that the wheel was most likely invented in Mesopotamia, in what is now present-day Iraq, somewhere around 5,500 to 3,000 B.C., a little strangely for the purpose of making pottery. Eventually, the new invention was applied to carts. But, until then, they probably thought that this wheel business was the best invention since fire in a fireplace!
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