Minds on Fire: Cognitive Aspects of Early Firemaking and the Possible Inventors of Firemaking Kits

Abstract

Thus far, most researchers have focused on the cognition of fire use, but few have explored the cognition of firemaking. With this contribution we analyse aspects of the two main hunter-gatherer firemaking techniques - the strike-a-light and the manual fire-drill - in terms of causal, social and prospective reasoning. Based on geographic distribution, archaeological and ethnographic information, as well as our cognitive interpretation of strike-a-light firemaking, we suggest that this technique may well have been invented by Neanderthal populations in Eurasia. Fire-drills, on the other hand, represent a rudimentary form of a symbiotic technology, which requires more elaborate prospective and causal reasoning skills. This firemaking technology may have been invented by different Homo sapiens groups roaming the African savanna before populating the rest of the globe, where fire-drills remain the most-used hunter-gatherer firemaking technique.