When Fire Approaches, Chimps Keep Their Cool

Interesting article in SCIENCENOW about the work of primatologist Jill Pruetz with the Fongoli chimps, regarding their behaviour toward fire. Instead of panicking and totally failing to comprehend the nature of fire, she noted that the chimps reacted to brush fires by carefully forging paths to avoid the outbreaks. If you allow that human mastership of fire required three stages: conceptualizing it (meaning also to lose fear of it); starting it; and containing it, Preutz argues, you can see chimp behaviour, perhaps, as a clue as to how some putative hominin ancestors reacted to fire, which eventually led to employing fire to cook food etc. I always have a problem with "chimps give clues to origins of human behaviour" stories because we did not evolve from them. So, if the logic is defensible it is only by virtue of arguing that chimps retained some vestige of loss of fear of fire that was present in the common ancestor of chimps and humans.