4.3.2 Promethean Mutations: Accidental Hominin Gene Editing

“From it [fire] they shall learn many arts.” Aeschylus, 5th BC, [256]

Hominin speciation reached its peak circa. 1.8 - 1.9 mya, with the fossil record evidencing that several species of the genus Homo coexisted in this period (Maslin et al, 2014), including Homo habilis, “Handy man” [circa. 1.6 – 2.5 mya], Homo ergaster, “Work man” [circa. 1.8 – 1.3 mya], and Homo erectus “Upright man” [circa 1.89 mya – 200 tya] (Bradshaw Foundation, n.d). While incomplete, the genus Homo fossil record indicates that whereas some species, such as H. habilis, became increasingly physiologically adapted to niche environments, others, such as H. erectus, evolved traits that extended their capacity to inhabit wide-ranging terrains, therein facilitated flexibility (Maslin et al, 2014). In the period 1.8 – 1.6 mya, H. habilis went extinct, while H. erectus thrived (deMenocal, 2004). Physiologically, H. erectus embodied the traits of genus Homo sensu lato including a brain 80% larger than that of Australopithecus afarensis [Lucy] and 40% larger than H. habilis, (Maslin et al, 2014), atop a body morphology as would have enabled long-distance running (Ibidem; Bramble and Lieberman, 2004) and the hurling of projectiles (Maslin et al, 2014; Roach et al, 2013). Behaviourally, H. erectus dispersed far beyond the arid grasslands of genus Homo origin, occupying sites in North Africa, Europe, and western Asia in the Calabrian [1.2 – 0.8 mya] (deMenocal, 2004; Abbate et al, 1998; Harris, 1983). Put succinctly, genus Homo had, by then, evolved such skills as enabled the colonisation of habits that were subject to seasonality (Gowlett, 2016).

The Pyrophilic Primate Hypothesis (Parker et al, 2016) proposes that fire-use came about not by accident, but by evolution of human thought and behaviour. Parker et al posit that in the first instance genus Homo grasped the foraging potentialities inherent in fire-prone landscapes. Therein, in similar fashion to extant fire followers, ran not away, but toward fire, that being an action increasingly enabled by the emerging Homo physiology. In the fire-prone landscapes of present-day western Australia Martu hunter-gathers light fires to flush out prey species including monitor lizards (Strain, 2010). In adopting the pyrophilic primate anthropological line of thought, one might picture a gathering of H. erectus, projectiles in hand, “calming monitoring” a low-severity grassland fire circ. 1 mya. The alpha conveying his excitement through the medium of dance, or perhaps a form of proto language, the early Hominin hunter- gathers ready to harvest the fruits not of the forest, but of the fire. Flames concealing their presence, as their quarry flees from the fire, the Homo huntsmen hurl a barrage of stones. Several antelope succumb to their ambush, the flesh of which will be stripped and eaten raw, together with flame-grilled roots foraged from the fire’s path. Upon sighting the charred carcass of a gazelle, the now hungry Hominins run to claim their ready-cooked meal. Upon pondering the fire-facilitated feast ahead, the alpha resumes his pyro-foxtrot. A succinct paleoscenario, the above pulls together aspects of Homo developmental hypotheses, including the Control of Fire Hypothesis (Wrangham and Carmody, 2010) and the Optimal Foraging Theory (Parker et al, 2016), with insights from artefacts and archaeological fauna found at sites in East Africa, including Kanjera, southern Kenya (Plummer et al, 2009).

The evolutionary heir to H. erectus, Homo heidelbergensis arrived circa. 800 tya (Maslin et al, 2014). Bearing a skeletal anatomy that evidences its members were able to hear human-like auditory patterns (Martinez et al, 2004), it has been posited that H. heidelbergensis communicated using a form of proto language. Technologically, archaeological artefacts in the form of symmetrical stone points found at a dig site in Kathu Pan, South Africa, suggest that by 500 tya H. heidelbergensis hunted not with unfashioned stones, but with spears (Wilkins et al, 2012). Several anthropologists speculate that fire foraging would have alerted these, and other early humans to the many benefits of fire, including its effect of foodstuffs [cooking], animal behaviour [hunting], and the environment [land-clearance] (Parker et al, 2016; Wrangham and Carmody, 2010). Furthermore, we might reasonably hypothesise that whereupon ambushing prey fleeing from fire, H. heidelbergensis and its predecessor H. erectus, also perceived fire’s capacity to keep contemporary apex predators, such as members of the genus Panthera [101], at bay.

Physiologically, foodstuffs foraged from burned sites, and in particular mammalian carcasses, would have provided maximum energy gain for minimal energy output. Studies in extant members of the Homininae family have evidenced that even a slight gain in net energy can manifest an increase in female reproductive output and survival rates (Wrangham and Carmody, 2010). Furthermore, studies into the impact of cooking on body mass index in both humans and animals have universally found that “the more cooked food in the diet, the greater the net energy gain” (Ibidem, p.4; Wrangham, 2009; Carmody and Wrangham, 2009). Recent research indicates that the process of cooking substantially increases the digestibility of both starch and protein foodstuffs (Wrangham and Carmody, 2010), they being the foremost food types that early humans would have foraged from burn sites. Additionally, the process of heating foodstuffs kills bacteria, therein reduces the probability of contraction of the ilk of Escherichia.coli and Salmonella infection (Ibidem). Another benefit of the consumption of cooked food is its relative softness, which in the pre-dentistry Pleistocenean epoch would have extended “the human life span beyond the age of good-quality teeth” (Pausas and Keeley, 2009, p.597). While the Grandmother Hypothesis (Hawkes, 2004) explores the possibility that fire-facilitated life-extension would have enabled post-menopausal females to assist in child-rearing, manifold would have been the ways in which older individuals, male and female, might have played a fundamental role in the development of human knowledge and understanding. The evidence thereof resides within the animal kingdom, as exemplified by matriarchal elephants [Elephantidae], which the “elder stateswomen” of herds “have unique influence over group decision-making”, thanks to their “trove of crucial information” (Ogden, 2014, online). Thus, while H. heidelbergensis, its ancestors and immediate descendants had not scientific means of establishing the benefits of the consumption of cooked foodstuffs one might reasonably assume that they made a cognitive connection between fire foraging and health, reproduction, and, more generally, quality of life. Anatomically, all members of genus Homo are “adapted to a cooked diet” (Wrangham and Carmody, 2010, p.9), but gastrointestinal and dental development suggest that H. erectus consumed a primarily soft, therein cooked diet, whereas its forebears did not (Ibidem).

One might posit the possibility that fires burning in the night ignited not merely biomass, but the early human imagination - the original ‘light bulb moment’. In illuminating the ancient African planes after dusk, fires shed light upon an otherwise hidden and dangerous world, and just as today a campfire helps keep man-eating predators, such as the East African lion (Panthera leo melanochaita) at a distance, a burning torch held aloft by a Pleistocenian human would have deterred the ilk of saber-toothed cat, such as the extinct genus Homotherium (Wrangham and Carmody, 2010; Brain, 1981). However, megafauna weren’t the only faunal threats control of fire would have helped to mitigate. Smoke emissions from several plant species discourage the presence of members of the “world’s deadliest animal” (Gates, 2014, online), the Culicidae family [mosquitoes], this being an observation that has long informed livestock farming and residential practices in rural Africa. Studies have established that, as the indigenous peoples believe, smouldering bark of the African copaiba balsam tree [Daniellia oliveri, rate >77.9%], seeds of the African oil palm [Elaeis guineensis, rate >69.0%], and Bush tea [Hyptis suaveolens, rate >85.4%] are effective in repelling mosquitoes (Palsson and Jaenson, 1999). While we have not record of when genus Homo first identified the properties of the smoke emissions of these, and other plants, we do know that ancient peoples adopted practices that evidenced a keen awareness of environmental cause and effect. For example, we know that Predynastic funerary finds from the Neolithic affirm that members of all societal strata were, by then, wearing eye make-up as a repellent to disease-carrying flies (Booth, 2015). Reverting to the Middle Palaeolithic, several members of the genus Homo, including H. heidelbergensis and Neanderthals, collected and ground mineral rocks, of which red ochre was the foremost prized (von Petzinger, 2016; Mining in Africa, 2016; Roebroeks et al, 2011). Ethnographic studies of present-day Namibian hunter-gatherer communities have identified several common uses of ochre [Fig. 32], one of which, as with biotic burning practices, is that of insect repellence. In vivo laboratory experiments have found that when some types of ochre are mixed with clarified butter and applied to the skin they “provide a sufficient degree of protection from mosquitoes” (Rifkin, 2016, p.64). The pigment ochre comes in colours ranging from yellow to brown, the variant thereof a consequence of its chemical content, the composition of which is shaped by the pedoenvironment [102]. Red ochre results from high levels of Hematite [alpha-Fe2O 3] and/or Maghemite [gamma-Fe2O3], the former of which is found in aerobic soils in environments where biomass turnover is rapid, temperatures are high, and moisture levels are low, whereas the latter is usually a consequence of fire (Grunwald, n.d). Therein, when the Homininae had stepped forth to fire-prone landscapes, be it in regard of foraging, hunting, tool-making, or vector- borne disease-control, their direction of travel was toward terrain rich in the resources that would underpin their future survival.

Science can tell us not when, where or how, early humans made the transition from fire foraging of foodstuffs to torches, but it can tell us that our pyrophilic propensities extended to controlled use of fire by H.erectus 1.5 - 1.2 mya (Speth, 2015; Sandgathe et al, 2011; Wrangham and Carmody, 2010; Wrangham, 2009; James, 1989). Anthropologically, nigh on all fire-origin mythological fingers point toward control of fire deriving from an acquisitive nature on the part of early humans, whom having recognised one or more of fire’s potential uses, and observed the material properties of the biota about them, proceeded to prod and to poke pyrophilic phenomena by means of enabling its procuration. However, whether the theft of fire was foraged on a fennel-stick, or in the fashion of Hephaestus, forged in a proto-workshop, it marked the most important evolutionary event of the epoch: the moment “Fire-planet Earth had found its keystone species” (Pyne, 2012, p.50), and “excepting language”, the “greatest ever” discovery made by man (Darwin, 1871, p. 52). Mythologically, sensu amplo Claude Lévi-Strauss [103] the fire-bird [104] and the ‘theft of fire’ are joined by the ‘eternal flame’, thus creating a universal pyro triptych: the source [fire-bird], the acquisition [theft of fire], and the retention [eternal flame]. The concept of the latter is largely consistent from one culture to another, in times both ancient and contemporary: be it Vestal Virgins in the presence of a statue of Pallas Athena in pre- republican Rome, or present-day Buddhist monks at the temple of Daishō-in at Mount Misen, Itsukushima, Japan, guardians are assigned the task of tending to a ‘sacred fire’, which kindled from the ‘original’ source, bares demiurgic significance. Whereupon, in the initial instance, fire was foraged not forged, might early humans have enacted not dissimilar practice, wherein they co-ordinated to sustain fire ‘stolen’ from the environment?

Whatsoever the origin of control of fire, the benefits of genus Homo’s behavioural pyro pangenesis[105] would be manifold. Acutely aware of the cyclical spatial-temporal configurations within and of their environment, H.erectus et Hominin al would have observed that post-fire grasslands attract herbivorous animals, and in turn, their predators (Komarek, 1969). In other words, while their mode of acquisition was the spear not basket, in attaining the capacity to ignite wildland fires, the Palaeolithic’s answer to the supermarket had arrived. Likewise, the foundations for farming were laid, for genus Homo was now equipped with means by which to increase the fertility of landscapes, therein quality and quantity of yields (Ibidem), while simultaneously clearing vermin and disease (Herron, 1999). So too had we a medium [smoke], as would enable the attainment of a foodstuff that would become so prized as to thought the ‘food of the gods’ in the form of nectar and ambrosia in Greek mythology, and an elixir of immortality in Hinduism: Honey. Multiple studies suggest that genus Homo was sufficiently versed in the control of fire as to be making landscape-scale interventions as early as 200 tya (Gowlett, 2016). In respect of fire regimes, the foremost environmental impact of early humans’ acquisition of control of fire was that of increasing the volume and timing of ignitions, and of changing both the structure and abundance of fuel (Bowman et al, 2011). The significance thereof varied from one fire regime to another, for then, as now, high-frequency regimes would have been relatively unaffected, low-frequency regimes vice versa.

Archaeologically, finds at several sites evidence that humans were engaging in early alchemical investigations by 250 tya at the very latest (Wrangham and Carmody, 2010). From fire-cracking rocks, to baking clay, ash, charcoal, wood, bone and lithics [stone tools] (Ibidem), cooking became the “pyrotechnic paradigm” and “the methodology of modern chemistry... a broad-spectrum catalyst for practically everything” genus Homo did (Pyne, 2012, p.47). Hence, be it in the general vicinity of the so-called ‘Cradle of Humankind’ (South Africa), the Great Rift Valley (Ethiopia/Kenya), the Jebel Irhoud cave (Morocco), or elsewhere, by the arrival of the species Homo sapiens between 350 – 160 tya (Schlebusch et al, 2017; Hublin et al, 2017; Hadingham, 2015), protomodern, or rather ‘Promethean man’ was well-versed in the pyrophilic arts. However, mirroring the general sentiments of Grecian mythology, recent scientific studies suggest that fire’s cooked lunch, is not a ‘free’ one. The poet Sappho spoke of Pandora unleashing disease upon humanity. Research published in 2016 postulates that the “leading cause of death resulting from a single bacterial pathogen worldwide” [Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex], became established as a direct consequence of control of fire creating “the ideal conditions for the emergence of TB [Tuberculosis] as a transmissible disease” (Chisholm et al, 2016, p. 9051). Supported by mathematical modeling, and a synthesis of data from the fields of epidemiology, evolutionary genetics, and paleoanthropology, the hypothesis comes with a stark warning, “feedback between cultural innovation and alteration of living conditions can catalyze unexpected changes with potentially devastating consequences lasting thousands of years” (Ibidem). However, whether, metaphorically speaking, the pathogenesis [106] of one or more pandemics rest at ‘Pandora’s feet’, it is without question that control of fire brought forth one very big box of unforeseen consequences, of which arguably the most devastating is its application in warfare.

Members of the taxonomic family Mycobacteriaceae are not the only organisms hypothesized to have genetically mutated in direct consequence of control of fire. Homo sapiens are the “only” Primate in which a mutation of the aryl hydrocarbon receptor may have provided an evolutionary advantage in the form of increased tolerance to polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons [toxins in smoke], over other members of the genus Homo (Hubbard et al, 2016). Put succinctly, molecular biology suggests that control of fire is so integral to the origin of our species as to be written, literally, in our DNA.

4.3.3 Summary

“Having described everything that exists as a result of man’s talent for making art copy Nature, I marvel to think that scarcely anything is brought to a finished state without the involvement of fire.” Pliny The Elder, 2004.

Etched in H. sapiens’ genetics, behaviours, beliefs, values, technologies, and architectures, fire is so fundamental to our evolution that, in its absence our species, genera, and order would be missing from the evolutionary Tree of Life. While we can be sure not precisely where, nor when a member of the Hominidae family first ‘stole’ fire from its wildland source, we know that from then onwards the implications to our species, and more recently, to all species, was profound. The archaeological record makes evident that the acquisition of knowledge of the application of fire as production process alighted g. Homo’s imagination with such ferocity as ignited not one, but many proto industries, including the Pleistocene equivalent of chemical plants [i.e. production of ochre paints] to technology firms [i.e. flint manufacture], utilities infrastructure [i.e. heating of shelters], the arts [i.e. making of musical instruments], and more.

Though many are the gaps as remain in our understanding of human development, as ever more archaeological sites are identified, and the contents thereof analysed, thereon compared to they of other periods and places, our picture becomes more complete: the peoples of the ancient past were innumerably more sophisticated and skilled than, until very recently, they were given credit. Whereupon we wish understand their philosophies, as reflected in their mythologies, and no less so than they as relate to fire and our species’ ancestral relationship therewith, we need look to the Neolithic world, and in turn to the Palaeolithic world, and to the migratory routes that were followed, to the environmental circumstances of the times, to the parallels between beliefs and practices of one place and another, and to these peoples’ still living legacy, to our genetics.

In tracing the history of humanity’s relationship with wildfire, and its derivative, cultivated fire, otherwise known as ‘industrial fire’, it becomes clear that the relationship resides not in a state of stasis, but of perpetual change - of evolution – and that the catalyst for change tends come not from within, but from without: from the environment, and more specifically fire’s behaviour in that environment. Which begs the question, as the climate, and with it, wildfire behaviour, transitions from the state of present to that of another geological epoch, how might we apply our ‘Tritogeneian Toolkit’ [107] [ability to imagine, thereon apply fire as production process] in the years and decades ahead?

>Continue to Chapter 4 [part IV] here.

Footnotes

[101] Genus Panthera, more commonly known as big cats, are the apex predators of the felid family.

[102] Pedoenvironment refers to the underlying environmental conditions that shape soil properties.

[103] In reference Lévi-Strauss’ structuralist thought, of which the premise is that of there being relative coherence in the metaphysical frameworks [i.e. mythological narratives] by which cultures seek to reveal universal truths.

[104] See Literature Review.

[105] Posited in ‘The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication’, first published in 1868, Pangenesis was Chares Darwin working hypothesis of the mechanism for heredity (Darwin online, 2015).

[106] Pathogenesis, in this context, is used to refer to the origin and evolutionary development of disease.

[107] A reference to tritô, meaning ‘head’, Tritogeneia is a Homeric epithet [Homer Hymn 28] for Athena (Baring the Aegis, 2013).

The thesis is also available in PDF format, downloadable in several parts on Academia and Researchgate.

Note that figures have been removed from the digital version hosted on this site, but are included in the PDFs available at the links above.

Citation: Sterry, M. L., (2018) Panarchistic Architecture: Building Wildland-Urban Interface Resilience to Wildfire through Design Thinking, Practice and Building Codes Modelled on Ecological Systems Theory. PhD Thesis, Advanced Virtual and Technological Architecture Research [AVATAR] group, University of Greenwich, London.