From the very beginning energy has been central to human existence. Economists will tell you that mastery of a new technology has always conferred a competitive advantage. In distant human history, when we were hunter gatherers, the key technology was fire. Humans are the only animal to have mastered fire and this conferred an evolutionary advantage. With fire, the energy provider, humans gradually conquered the planet. Anthropologists and ancient historians refer to the first 400,000 years of the history of our species as the era of fire.

The anthropologist James Scott describes us as a “pyrophyte” species, an animal shaped by fire. Fire gave us heat, allowing us to roam into inhospitable territory. Fire also allowed us to cook, and heating food released energy, allowing us to eat a far more varied diet. Hard nuts were softened by fire, letting our jaws shrink, as we didn’t need such powerful jaw muscles – fire did the softening-up for us. Our stomachs became smaller, our brains bigger.

Fire also changed us socially. Around the hearth we developed language. Chatting away allowed our imaginations to speculate of the origin of the world, creating myths and ultimately religious beliefs. More than anything, fire helped make us social, as our nomadic ancestors moved from place to place, each place anchored by the communal fire.

Because fire is an energy in itself, and because heat by changing molecular structure releases energy, this amazing technology and humans have been intertwined for millenniums. In very recent centuries, the industrial revolution was, in a way, little more than the result of humans finding lots of new things to burn, generating the heat required to alter the molecular structure of all sorts of other things, paving the way for modern chemistry.

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