Fire: the Spark That Ignited Civilisation

When humanity turned the naturally occurring phenomenon of fire into a technology, it forged a path from caves to the cosmos and civilised the world

‘Fire became as integral to the ecology of ideas as to that of the Earth. It did for knowledge what it did for wildlands and dwellings. It could rework thought as it did metal or clay. If it required explanation, it could also explain. Fire was the ultimate dialectical tool, capable equally of deconstructing the text of the world into its constituent pa…