Energies incandescentes et développement technique et culturel de l’humanité de l’usage contrôlé du feu depuis vers 400 000 ans B.P. à l’âge thermonucléaire à partir de 1945 

Obarè B. BAGODO

Maître de conférences/Associate Professor

Université d’Abomey-Calavi, Bénin

Email : [email protected]

Abstract

Incandescent Energies and Technical and Cultural Development of Humanity from controlled use of fire since ca. 400 000 BP to the Thermonuclear Age from 1945 onwards.

            The intentionally lighted and permanently maintained fire in order to obtaining combustion with simultaneous production of huge heat, light and flame is to be defined firstly as an incandescent energy. It is to be then specified and accepted as an artificial product (i.e. artefact), and subsequently to be differentiated from natural incandescent energies like those produced by sunlight, volcanic eruption and thunder discharge amongst others. The humanly controlled use of fire is admitted to have become a visible and testable practice inducing techno-scientific aims and implications since almost 400 000 B.P. (i.e. before present). Such controlling use of fire led to progressively discover and manipulate the generating and/or stimulating principles of posterior artificial incandescent energies till the currently terrifying thermonuclear energy.

            In this regard the controlled use of fire had been a no controversial landmark step expertise in the technical and cultural development of Humanity. Such breakthrough acquired skill is thus wisely admitted by Stone Age archaeologists as the third explanatory criterion of the naissance of earlier or inaugural ‘primitive’ humanization. It is then associated with the two earlier African-based criteria such as (i) the mastering of stone tool-making-and-using since ca. 3.3 m. yr. (i.e. 3.3 million years ago) (ii) and the lately skill of settlement camp building up from 1.8 – 1.5 m. yr. to the Egyptian Pharaonic architecture till the modern one.     

            Around the world, the successfully progressive skill-based controlled use of fire is usually termed by specialists as the ‘‘domestication of fire’’. Accordingly with the state of the research since the 1980s till nowadays, the skill of controlled use of fire is presumed to have been preceded, conditioned and probably inspired by accidental and punctual beneficial advantage obtained from natural fire due to volcanic eruptions and thunder electric discharges. With such minded concern the earliest intentionally burnt traces of fireplaces without hearths have been located and documented in inter-tropical Africa. This is done with the indication of 400-600°C and the dating of 1.4 m. yr. at Koobi Fora and Chesowanja sites in Kenya and at Swartkrans site in South-Africa, as well as at Gadeb site credited with 1.5 m. yr. in Ethiopia. Elsewhere, lately traces are mentioned with also limited or problematic archaeological relevance evidence at the 0.7 m. yr. dated Gesker Benot Ya’ akov site in Israel/Palestine, as well as at the 0.65 m. yr. dated Prezletice site in Czech Republic.

            At these different sites relevant evidence of hearth or deliberately 500-700°C lighted and maintained fire had not been unearthed in inclusively association with proven mineralogical modifications of clays, improve of magnetic susceptibility, transformation from primary to secondary iron oxides, amount of burnt bones, ashes or partial de-carbonized sediments. On the contrary, many of such geochemical characteristics are found in the boreal temperate zone but at more recent archaeological on-site deposits dated respectively to 400 000 – 380 000 B.P. at Tarra Amata site in France, 380 000 B.P. at Vertesszöllös site in Hungary, and 400 000 – 200 000 B.P. at Zhoukoudian site in China.

            The aforementioned lines of arguments let to hypothetically admit that the long-term controlling process of fire use is proven to correspond to gradual steps of technical skills and craft arts associated with sociocultural lifestyles. Amongst these induced technics and craft arts and sociocultural lifestyles some have to be mentioned specifically. It is the case of the heating of pebble or stone block before knapping it, as well as the lately ceramic heating, food cooking, melting or reducing of metal ores, thermic refining of metals, and also the invention of electric power in the 19^th century and the atomic energy and thermonuclear bomb from 1945 onwards. In taking into account the impact of learning and mastering such cumulative induced or derivative skills, the controlled use of fire can actually be considered as a decisive factor of the successful achievements of humanization undertaken from ca. 400 000 B.P. to the present times.

            But there is the need to be wise that the long-term and still continuing controlled use of fire incandescent energy is to be dissociated in many-side way and sense from any idea of “domestication”. This concluding remark can be hardly contented with minimal required precaution to simply reminding the successive failed fight against the recent 2015 and 2017 disastrous dry bushfire in the U.S.A. despite the sophisticated equipment and some nine to ten thousand servicemen and women including Australian and New Zelander rescuing contingents.

Key words: Humanity, technical and cultural development, controlled usage of fire,        incandescent energies..