The Surprising Psychology of Fire That Explains Gender Roles and Male Violence

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Introduction: Who is in control

I don't know about you, but I have been thinking about the fire more than usual lately. I live in Portugal where it seems half the country is on fire. If I look out my window, I can't even see the sun because of smoke.

But in fact, there are wildfires raging across the entire Mediterranean, also across central and Southeast Asia, Australia, south America, and North America.

In fact, in Canada, there's one fire in Saskatchewan. It's about twice the size of the entire country of Lichtenstein. And over in the north of Alaska, there seems to be more fires than there are actually people. Well, whilst you digest that, I think it's time that we think about our relationship with fire and how it has shaped us as humans.

Because there's more to this story than meets the eye.

This is a story that isn't spoken about a lot. But way, way back in history, fire reshaped human bodies and brains. It changed our psychology [00:01:00] and our society. Well, it, it basically created all of them, in fact. So to explore this a bit further, I'm going to play you an episode all about fire

and how it defines humanity from my new podcast called How to Change the World . Because this episode is fascinating as hell. So hello and welcome to the Growth Mindset Psychology Show today where we normally look at the science of self-improvement and the philosophy of a life well lived with me, Sam Webster Harris.

but for me, a big part of a growth mindset is the curiosity to learn about things that we don't know and to be open to rethink the things that we feel we do know. And in the episode that you're going to hear, . We are talking about ideas that challenge our assumptions of what it means to be human

and why society is the way it is. We'll be learning about fire's, influence on gender roles, male violence and fun stuff like our eating habits. .

But before I give it all away, I will just ask you to trust me that you will [00:02:00] genuinely want to hear this episode as something mind blowingly fascinating that you would never have expected. And on that, enjoy

Picture yourself on a winter evening sitting by the fireplace, feeling rather pleased with yourself. Look at me. You think Master of flame, controller of combustion. Yes, you built this fire. You fed it with your logs and you could extinguish its life if you felt like it.

How civilized and in control you are. But the fire might view it differently. Its flickering. Flames have their own hypnotizing nature that promises warmth and safety. , its light pushes off the natural urge for drowsiness of the dark. And in fact, those crackling sounds of fire call forth ancient neural pathways to huddle with friends and family and tell stories

now imagine that it's the summertime, the scent of a barbecue or watts into your nostrils. [00:03:00] The compulsion, when we smell it to devour flame. Grilled food is as undeniable as death in taxes. The desire

for perfectly smoked melt in your mouth. Food as you do the bidding of fire and not the other way round.

Fire has its own agenda and it always has. Yes, we are the species that believes we control fire, yet we are the only species that fire has completely rewired from the inside out,

You no doubt know that a fire will not spark without fuel or oxygen. While today we'll be learning how civilization itself would not exist without the combination . If humans and fire.

The Role of Fire in Civilization

Welcome to How to Change the World. I [00:04:00] am Sam Webster Harris, and we are on a chronological journey through history's most transformative innovations.

Today discussing fire. Every time you flip a light switch, you are commanding invisible fires by burning fuels in power plants. Every time you drive or fly anywhere, you're sitting on top of tiny controlled explosions happening thousands of times per minute.

In fact, your laptop and house were built using raw materials created in furnaces

we've gone from sitting around campfires in Africa to. expanding across the entire world, , and today we live inside a massive planet wide fire system that we've somehow made mostly invisible.

Fire's Impact on Predators and Prey

The story of humanity is the story of fire.

In this episode, we will go right back to the very beginning of the human story, , because fire marked the great reversal in our fortunes

A perfect demonstration can be found in cave excavations across the world, one such cave in South Africa. , at its deepest and oldest layers, we see a [00:05:00] story of the layers of lions and leopards around the full skeletal remains of these big cats is a litter of fragmented bone, shards of their various prey, gazelle, birds, even the odd hominid. Our ancestors,

a human like FEMA with some big two marks definitely reminds us of who was the boss.

But then we get to a higher stratus or layer in the cave dated from around a million years ago. And there we see the first signs of fire being used, and with it a very different story unfolding. This cave is now clearly the home of early humans

, who appear to lie at peace with their complete skeletons and around them are scattered. The bone shards of all sorts of animals, from snakes and lizards to flamingos and rats, even the nor bones of lions . With the marrow sucked completely dry. Yes. A fire not only marked the hasty eviction of cave ownership by big predators.

But more importantly, humans violently threw them off the top of [00:06:00] the food chain

as they went from being the hunted to the hunter. Now, yes, there is a lot more to the story of fire than predator, prey relationships and humans filling caves with their rubbish.

Don't you worry.

and so today we'll be exploring how this single innovation,

the domestication of fire over a million years ago transformed our species, and thenallowed us to expand across the globe and eventually gave us the power to supercharge our industrial revolution. On the way we'll explore why no other species has managed this feed, how it impacted things like gender roles. And in the final section, we will peer into the future. After all, we are living in the dawn of a possibly equal new power , from artificial intelligence.

First Fire - 500 million years ago

But firstly, long before all of that, and before we even get to the part where humans become fire wielding maniacs, we need to rewind the clock to 500 million years ago,

To us, the [00:07:00] earth would appear like an alien planet

For a long, long time. It had just been bare rock and vast oceans that slowly became filled with algae. , but now 500 million years ago, we are at a time when the first plants were trepidatious setting their roots into soil or. Should I say rock

these were plants like mosses and liver warts, and they were soon followed by the first animals crawling outta the ocean onto the land.

Oxygen levels had reached a balmy , 15 to 16%, and the last requirement to create fire was of course. A spark such as say, a lightning strike and hay presto.

The first fires

a curious insight here. If God really did make planet Earth and our beautiful ecosystems, then he was probably an avid reader of Marie Kondo and her book, the Simple Magic of Tidying Up.

When God looked over the land, he would've been troubled by the amount of

dead plants piling upWhen he saw the same species [00:08:00] all over the place,

He would've desired them to all be in the right homes and in his excited effort to create a tidy home for his creations. By far, his favorite tool would've been fire. Fire would clear out all the accumulated dead junk that piled up and put everything back in its right place, returning nutrients to soil, and creating an amazing patchwork of unique habitats , for a stunning variety of species across his beloved planet, each of which surely sparked great joy.

So if you were looking for proof that God might exist, you could possibly propose that the global average of 8.6 million lightning strikes a day is clear evidence that he does exist and that he really likes tidying up. But Fun aside fire has always been very biblical as a topic.

It is one of the essential four elements that transcends religions from a balancing force of Zen Buddhism to the punishing fire in the Qan or Norse belief of fire as both a creator and destroyer.

[00:09:00] The long and short of this candle is

that fire became nature's reset button.

It's paradoxical for humans to realize that fighting natural fire makes things worse. Like stopping a river that flows completely in its tracks, leads to it, eventually flood over in Yellowstone . Fire ranges spent decades preventing fire, and found that the ecosystems began dying

as timber and thickets built up in the undergrowth, animals and wolves disappeared. Rivers changed courses and biodiversity plummeted , without the regular guiding hand of fire to keep things in order.

In fact, so much undergrowth builds up , when we prevent fire spreading, that when wildfires eventually do start, which they will, we get these mega fires , that are much, much more destructive.

So to summarize, first fire was part of Earth's natural immune system, balancing the intricate web of life.

This unruly force was bounded by ecological common sense. , nature's rule book, if you will. And this is all crucial to remember because humans . Were about [00:10:00] to start setting fire to everything and anything including that all important rule book.

Humans and fire - ~2 million years ago

We are now going to go through a minor time jump of 498 million years to roughly 2 million years ago and into the heart of Africa.

Early human ancestors were about to make the leap from fearing fire to controlling it, representing possibly one of the most audacious experiments in the history of all of life. If you think about what our ancestors were attempting, domesticating a force that could not just kill them, but burn down their entire home and ecosystem.

There is a dubious piece of Chinese philosophy that says, build a man a fire, and he will be warm for a day. Set a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.

A stupid saying, but worth noting that,

it was a risky undertaking. Picture an early human, millions of years ago. Lightning strikes the savanna igniting a grass fire every sensible creature. Fleas, , including you, [00:11:00] of course, but the smell of something cooking brings you to scour through the wreckage.

Whilst the embers are still smoking, , what you find is perfectly cooked. Insects, roasted roots, . Barbecued small animals the meat on it practically falls off the bone. The roots were sweet and soft, and your belly feels satisfied in ways that it just never has before. And if you're thinking that what I'm saying is a silly claim, surely, before we ate cooked food regularly, we wouldn't actually want it.

Well, the opposite is true. Fire transforms food into something more edible. Tubers and meat tastes way better

to chimps and nearly all animals than giving them the raw version.

To give you perspective, chimps have even learned to wait for meat to cook. And chimps absolutely love meat. , Richard Rangu says that when they catch meat, the whole gang gets the zoomies and they jump around excitedly, enjoy the lead. Male might snatch most of it and race to the top of a tree, whilst others gleefully catch scraps or even lick drops of blood or [00:12:00] leaves.

Yet, even they can wait patiently for meat to be cooked, showing that clearly there is a biological reason deeper than just a human preference for it. However, it was only humans that made the connection that fire could be controlled to make their food tasty and nutritious, just how they like it.

The Discovery of Fire

But of course here we run into an issue. Waiting for the occasional wildfire was like waiting for lightning to charge your phone . Not only unreliable, but also the definition of overqualified. The real breakthrough was making fire portable and well, you know, a little bit smaller.

The ancient Greeks believed that the Titan Prometheus handed fire to humanity. Richard Rangu. The anthropologist likes the idea that as early Hommies were tenderizing their meat by bashing it with stones to make it slightly more edible. They might have accidentally made sparks in the occasional fire, and that might sound unlikely, but if you imagine your entire life outside and the fact that every time you ate meat you had to whack it a [00:13:00] lot with stones, then it's not so unrealistic.

, of course, other theories suggest that humans picked up half burned logs after a fire with Emil alive , and to experiment with how to build and sustain fires.

, of course, unless we build a time machine, we will never actually know exactly how humans discovered fire.

But certainly once they had, you can imagine a roaming band of early humans, , one carrying a smoldering log wrapped in green leaves. Another has learned to keep embers alive in a hollowed gord filled with dry timber.

Our early ancestors, not just using fire, , but in a relationship with it, planning ahead, thinking about fire's needs as well as their own. This wasn't just a technological innovation.

fire transformed humans from reactive creatures into planning creatures.

When did we discover Fire

And whilst we're talking about timelines, it's worth answering the question of how we know when this all first happened. Well, again, the answer is hard to know exactly, but the archeological evidence [00:14:00] does keep pushing this date further back. As we discover new remains of older and older fires.

Not long ago, we thought the first fire was 800,000 years ago, then it was 1.3 million years ago, now it seems to be 1.5 million years ago. But if we instead look at the biological evidence from human remains, it suggests that fire's influence on our evolution began around 1.8 to 2 million years ago with our ancestors Homoerectus.

So I'm going with Richard Range's estimates.

Stadium of Grandmothers

Now sticking on the topic of human evolution and Richard Ham's ideas. Here is another proposition that he made to help us grasp the scale of the changes to our species

he asks that we go on a thought experiment. Imagine arriving early at a stadium that seats 60,000 people. You sit down with your grandmother,

next to her, sits her grandmother, your great, great grandmother. And the pattern continues each seat filled by another grandmother. As you go through all your ancestors flowing backwards through [00:15:00] time.

An hour later, the stadium has been filled in order. And the final seat is occupied. Now to your right, . She nudges your elbow, and you turn to see not a human face, but something wonderfully other. A low forehead, a massive brow ridge, , a powerful jaw, long muscular arms built for climbing.

Yes, she is your ancestor,

and she's definitely getting some funny looks if she turned up to school. In these last 2 million years, evolution was in quite a hurry to change things over these 60,000 generations.

Fire's Influence on Human Biology

From climbing trees to posting tiktoks Fire has a lot to answer for. So? How did it change us?

, well, fire represented a huge leverage in energy.

I.Just as Watermills harness rivers to grind grain and windmills can capture air currents to pump water. Fire became humanity's first external energy system.

It. Performed the biological work of processing and digesting our food [00:16:00] outside of our bodies. Cooking gelatinized starch, dena's proteins, melts fats, and makes meat and plants much, much easier to chew. It also kills parasites and germs and

all of this wonderful help , contributed to the extraordinarily short amount of time that Schumers can spend chewing and digesting.

When we look at the apes, gorillas possess jaw muscles that can crack walnuts, chimpanzees have grinding teeth that can shred tree bark, and orangutans have digestive systems that can extract nutrients from very tough waxy leaves , that trust me, you would not want to put in a salad.

Humans traded all of these biological advantages to just outsource our digestion to fire.

And if you want some more perspective, a Gorilla eats 18 kilos or 14 pounds of raw food a day. Whereas we eat one and a half to two kilos of food, mostly cooked. In fact, a chimpanzee, which is only half our size, still eats twice as much as us.

And the result of this [00:17:00] is that apes have to spend six hours a day chewing their raw food, whereas we get a sore jaw if we try to eat one large raw carrot.

Jaw is so comparatively tiny and weak because we only need one hour a day to chew our very soft food,

So fire already seems to be a pretty big life hack,

but there's plenty more

When our ape ancestors finally get a break from all that chewing, you know what they're doing? , no, not procreation. They are resting and digesting for another eight hours a day. In fact on the topic of procreation, they have such little time left to them that.

The average procreation session is a whopping seven to eight seconds. , so an overlooked but incredibly appreciated impact of fire is, that we humans are lucky enough to enjoy entire minutes of naughty business when we get lucky. So I think I speak for all of humanity for a second here on the podcast when I say, thank God for fire, or Prometheus,

or your ape, like, great, great, great, [00:18:00] great grandmother.

Okay, whilst you digest that tangent,

Fire and Human Digestion

Let's get back to discussing your anatomy. Compared to great apes, our guts are almost half the size., and that's important to know because digesting is actually quite a costly thing to do, you've gotta produce lots of crazy juices and acids and maintain all of the tissues in your long gut,

which is quite nice to not have to bother doing.

but there's more cooked food, actually just has more energy in it.

A bit like when you make charcoal by basically cooking wood to make it more energy dense. zoo animals in captivity will put on weight much faster on a cooked food diet than a raw food one. and well wishes in the UK who find cute hedgehogs in their garden might kindly feel like feeding them a little bit, but quickly they'll be surprised to find that hedgehogs can become obese.

So much so that if you feed a hedgehog regularly, it'll get so fat that it can no longer roll into a ball, , which and makes the point that cooking is just a crazy leverage for our species.

[00:19:00] We extract more calories with less effort and doing more with less is the fundamental story of human innovation that we are going to be seeing time and again , as we go through this podcast, and I'll be doing a deep dive on this actual topic of energy and leverage for sure.

But remember as always, there is a trade off and you don't get something for nothing..

Humans can literally no longer survive on just raw food alone and fire is hardly a bonus. It is literally an essential requirement.

We became like an optimized engine that needs a specifically treated fuel mix, but this rocket fuel made another change in your body that made this possibly one of the best deals in history.

By outsourcing half of our digestion department to fire, we had a spare energy budget to fund the growth of the most expensive organ in the animal kingdom. Our brain.

You may have heard that it's only 2% of your body weight, yet it uses about 20% of our energy. Brains are three times bigger than our closest relatives to [00:20:00] chimpanzees.

They may have impressive abilities to chew in human amounts of raw food for hours,

but our brains allow us to do un chimp like feats of planning, cooperating and creativity, which is of course why human civilization and this podcast exists.

And that leads us nicely into the next section

when we discuss, when did all this strategizing and human planning happen?

Okay. We are taking a short break to talk about the advertisers that keep the Growth Mindset Podcast running, and you'll be pleased to know that if you subscribe to my new show called How to Change the World, there are currently no advertisers there. So you are welcome to listen to the rest of this episode there if you want.

Otherwise, I will catch you on the other side of the ad break where we learn about how fire changed our social lives, our gender roles, and influence things like male violence and female attraction.

Catch you in a minute.

Light and Campfires

Well, we can now discuss the second gift of fire. Now, as I'm sure you remember from your chemistry lessons, what does fire [00:21:00] create? Yes. Heat and light.

We've already covered how we deployed the heat energy for our needs. Well, the energy release from light also gave us leverage in a different way.

Before Firelight existed, , we were just too exposed to sleep on the floor in the dark. So we slept in the trees.

Once we had a central campfire, we could stay safe on the floor and leave our life in the trees behind

Before fire, the Athene did have bipedal walking, but they still needed to climb trees regularly.

And when you look at their feet, you can see they had a big toe that was a bit more like a thumb. If you ever look at chimpanzees, you'll see that their feet literally look a bit more like hands. Well, homoerectus was the first human species that was able to give up

they're climbing hand like feet, and instead get the stubby big toe , that we see today. And that allowed them to truly master by people walking, which is much more energy efficient and much better for running long distances without getting tired.

This of course, led to the evolution of other cool unique features,, as we adapted to long distance running like [00:22:00] our sweating system and breathing regulation, which I will talk about more in the future.

But already it's amazing to consider how many knock on effects come back to just.

Having the safety of fire at night.

But these safe spaces were not just useful for sleeping, but also for hanging out. Picture an early human camp 400,000 years ago, darkness falls instead of huddling in trees. 20 to 30 humans can gather around flickering fires. Light of course, suppresses melatonin production, keeping them alert and social. Children can listen to adults weave their day's events into dramatic stories or terrible jokes, The all important ritual of sitting around a campfire, farting and singing dodgy campfire songs was born,

Now in terms of knock on effects, the crafting and developing of language storytelling culture,

has a huge advancement due to the extended evening hours that we have.

If you look at the Apes, chimpanzees sleep for 12 hours, orangutan sleep for 15 hours, whereas humans get away with seven to eight [00:23:00] hours.

Mealtimes

Okay, so whilst we are still in the topic of direct impacts on humans from fire, I have just two more reflections that we can, consider before we start to zoom out. Firstly, continuing the topic of social behavior. Food historian Felipe Fernandez arm.

Ernesto made a good point. He said that cooking created the concept of mealtimes and thereby organized people into community promoted cooperation through sharing because the cook always distributes food compared to eating as you graze, like gorillas just eat leaves as they find them .

Instead, we get the concept of an actual family meal.

So cue the classic quote, A family that eats together stays together. It's honestly no surprise that desire to share meals with others is as ingrained into our culture's, religions, and psyche at a similar level to our obsession with staring at fire because for literally millions of years, . It is how we connected with each other and reflected on the day ,

and looked after each other by [00:24:00] sharing what we had.

So both acute and important practice that I am all for.

And now my second reflection, , which is a bit more anatomical.

Fire's Role in Human Birth and Survival

As you will remember so far, we have smaller jaws and teeth for less chewing, bigger brains for more thinking and less climbing and more walking, which means shorter arms, longer legs, and narrower hips. , well, the observant anatomists amongst you might notice an issue bipedal walking with narrower hips and bigger brains.

No, no. That would be really stupid. You might say, well, you would be right because it is If lightning truly was potential proof that God exists. Well, leaving women to push their giant headed babies through narrow hips

is potential proof that he actually doesn't, I mean, sure. Why not? Let's just create an extremely tight birth canal with a big twist in it for no reason. Hmm.

Well, regardless of your thoughts,

[00:25:00] despite this being a giant pain for our species, especially the women, obviously the one thing that stopped us from being a complete evolutionary dead end was in fact cooked food. Our increased nutrition meant that we were able to start having babies earlier, and that were less grown, which means that humans have babies that are totally not ready for the world. , and yes, it still doesn't solve the problem, but it at least it helps a bit.

Human mothers used to have a one to 2% risk of dying in childbirth, which for our ancestors that had eight babies became a 10 to 20% risk across their lifetime.

If we were to compare that to other rapes , that walk on all fours with their wider hips and smaller heads, well our birth risks are completely wild. Luckily today, modern medicines reduces most of these risks. But that is incredibly recent, so the fact that despite this giant biological trade off we became the dominant species, shows that fire's advantages were overwhelming.

Which leads us nicely to a new [00:26:00] question.

Why Only Humans Mastered Fire

If fire was such an incredible advantage, why didn't any other species figure it out?

I mean, if you think about it, plenty of animals have learned to fly, which isn't exactly easy. Chameleons occupy squids.

They can change colors and melt into the background. Certain eels and fish can electrocute you. Like evolution can find a way to do some pretty difficult things.

This question is even more puzzling when you think that chimps absolutely love cooked food, they'll go completely nuts for it. In fact, Bonobos in research facilities, , they have learned to pick up pans firewood when they want their dinner heated up for them.

Like they totally understand that fire plus food is delicious.

So what has stopped other animals? Well, lucky us, we had a unique combination of traits. , We had the right body, , as I said, our Ourone ancestors were bipedal, meaning they walked on just their legs that [00:27:00] freed up their hands , which is conveniently very useful for carrying and manipulating fire , without setting yourself on fire. , remember, all other apes literally walk on their knuckles, , which is kind of inconvenient.

Secondly, we had the right minds, even before we mastered fire, , our ancestor, homo Habilis had brains that were 50% bigger than modern chimps. the extra brain power was just enough to make the cognitive leap from fire, scary to fire, useful if handled carefully.

Then after we started cooking regularly, homoerectus developed brains twice the size of chimps pretty quickly. At that point we were no longer just using fire. We were thinking strategically about fire planning around fire, and probably having philosophical debates about the nature of fire.

Then lastly, we also had the right attitude.

Every other animal on planet Earth was giving a hard pass on the whole flaming death experiment business humans were the only [00:28:00] species willing to repeatedly risk death to understand fire's patterns and subsequently push the boundaries of what was possible. As the saying goes, if you play with fire, you will get burnt.

But what the saying doesn't say. Is that you also get to rule the world

a different saying that's worth noting by Richard Nixon He says that the finest deal has to go through the hottest flames,

fire, really forged humanity into something new and as we'll start learning about later, it

also made us a pretty terrifying species for everything else on Earth.

Fire, Social Structures & Gender Roles

But before we get onto that, Let's talk about gender roles.

Okay. We've established that fire turns humans into cooking addicts that was our act one. Now it's time for a plot twist. As we reach. Roughly 400,000 years ago, as the early humans mastered fire control, it began reshaping something else entirely, our social structures and relationships.

In fact, it basically invented the concept of [00:29:00] marriage and not in the romantic way that you're thinking. Instead, it was an economic partnership. Here's how it worked. One person specialized in the dangerous mobile work, hunting, security, et cetera, whilst the other partner mastered the complex stationary work gathering, fire management and cooking.

this wasn't about dominance by one or the other, it was literally about efficiency. If you travel to any traditional society on earth from the Inuit hunters in the Arctic, to the hads of forages in Tanzania, you will find the same division. Women run the kitchen operations , and marriage fundamentally revolves around sharing food.

Among the Inuit, every wife was expected to have a substantial meal ready. When her husband returned from hunting, . The smell of boiling seal, meat, and broth would greet hunters , as they entered their igloos.

This wasn't about tradition, it was just survival economics. Now that doesn't mean that there were never arguments or toxic relationship styles. To [00:30:00] quote, anthropologist, will Jim Stefansson, . When talking about the Inuit, he says, A wife who cooks badly might be beaten, shouted at, chaste, or have her possessions broken, but she can also respond to abuse by refusing to cook or threatening to leave.

And in case I'm giving the impression that this is something that men decided, we can look at societies where women run overthink. Instead. the mega layer people in India there, women own all the property. They make all the decisions. , and guess what? Women still do most of the cooking.

So this suggests that the patent of cooking and job roles isn't about male domination, but about practical specialization that emerged from just the unique demands of a fire based food system.

So if it's not just patriarchy, let's look at the bigger picture. In the animal kingdom, mating systems adapt to their feeding systems and it's not the other way around.

So if we look at chimpanzees,, a female chimpanzee, needs support from all the males in her community to defend a large feeding territory of scattered fruit [00:31:00] trees that she can eat from. Because of this, she doesn't bond with just one male.

Instead, she mates with all of them, and that way they have a stake in protecting her and her children. I.However, if we look at gorillas, a female gorilla can eat leaves and basically anywhere, and she doesn't need a defended food territory, rather, she just needs protection from other gorillas.

So females tend to mate with just a single dominant male.

Well, in early humans we find that fire and cooking created a completely new feeding system and that required a new social system to match it and pair bonding was the answer.

It's a partnership where each person brings different skills to the table. To be clear, I don't want to give the false impression that women only ever cooked and never participated in a single hunt. We can be sure that sometimes entire villages worked together in hunts.

, occasionally the odd woman was a gifted hunter,

but it wasn't the norm whilst we were on the topic. I mentioned male aggression earlier. It turns out there was even a role for male aggression in certain [00:32:00] circumstances.

If you've ever watched nature documentaries, you might remember seeing a cheetah killer, a gazelle with vultures circling overhead quickly, attracting lions and hyenas to steal the kill from them.

Well, a similar issue happens with humans when we cook with fire, the smoke trail broadcasts your location to every hungry human within miles. Well. Someone needed to be responsible for guarding the operation, and the husband that's willing to bonk anyone on the head for taking your dinner was a good husband.

So in fact, even today, . Psychology studies do show repeatedly that women do have, on average , a preference for men that display some aggressive qualities,

which , when we look at our history, certainly makes sense to desire a man interested in hunting and defending you.

Luckily for you, we will have a huge deep dive into aggression in the next episode on language and cooperation.

But whilst we're talking about interesting psychology, here is something else that might surprise you

among the bon if people, researchers discovered that husbands were [00:33:00] actually very chill about their wives sleeping with other guys. However. Feeding another man was an absolute no-go.

essentially that meant that sexual infidelity was an annoying but tolerable event, but food infidelity that meant immediate divorce. And the interesting thing here is it just flips our modern assumptions about what matters in a relationship.

It really shows us that early human marriage was essentially a business contract

of the wife, providing consistent high quality food preparation and fire management services in exchange for protein procurement and physical security. Now romance within that was probably a nice bonus, but the core transaction was economic. sure, it does make you think of the phrase that the way to a man's heart is through his stomach.

But rather than acute saying, it's perhaps describing a fundamental basis of human pair bonding for most of our species existence until the modern day.

Role Change in the Information Age

of course we do live in a very different time now. We are blessed to live in an information age ,

where physical power and aggression [00:34:00] isn't especially useful, and both members of a marriage can gather all the food and resources they need using just their brains.

It's crazy to realize how recent this is. In the 1980s when Margaret Thatcher was only the prime minister of the entire United Kingdom. She still took responsibility to put a meal on the table for her family every day, which is crazy and a very outdated expectation.

Things really started to change around the year 2000.

Where you can see the public interest shift. Jamie Oliver, for example, became famous with his naked chef series showing men that they can cook after all, and it might actually make them more attractive to females if they can bish bash, bosh something into the oven.

this did lead to one unhappy man , pushing Mr. Jamie Oliver up against a wall and saying it was Jamie's fault, that now he has to cook three meals a week, which is just a crazy reminder how recent this change is. And on topic of recent changes, even more recently over the 2010s, many of us [00:35:00] became incredibly time sensitive and lazy.

When we do cook, we want it ready in 15 minutes, and sadly, increasing numbers of us don't even cook at all.

Regardless if history and biology teaches anything, change is constant and those who don't adapt fall behind.

So I found this section interesting and useful to understand how things were, and also learning about why , does help us make better choices about how they could be in the future.

Fire did create the first economic partnerships between the sexes that did last for hundreds of thousands of years.

And today, as we look towards the future, they no longer serve us.

Right, so we've got a bit ahead of ourselves in the timeline there

to remind you. Those changes first started happening around 400,000 years ago, and at this point, fire has transformed our bodies and societies, but its greatest test was yet to come around 70,000 years ago.

Fire's Role in Human Expansion - 70,000 years ago

Armed with our powerful fire and our increasing language and cooperation skills, [00:36:00] humans stepped through a doorway that would lead to every corner of the earth.

Yes. Fire went beyond changing how humans lived. It changed where they could live. So think about this for a second. Polar bears can only live in the arctic. Camels can only live in deserts, and gorillas can only live in jungles. .

Second half of the episode on the new show

right. Sorry to cut the episode off there. That was the first part of the episode on fire in my new show, how to Change the World. But there is plenty more of it to go. If you want to hear the second half of the episode and learn how humans took over the whole globe, what on earth happened with the Industrial Revolution and where society is going to next as we create new unruly technology like AI, that might give us as much leverage as Fire First did?

Well, wherever you get your podcast, you will have to go and find my new show called How to Change the World, the History and Future of Innovation. Links to the show are in the description to make [00:37:00] it easy for you to find. And I would really love it if you do go and start listening to my new show because, you know, it is hard to grow a new podcast these days, even when your new podcast has been featured by Apple, which it has . Because they think it's good. So, um, very happy about that. Anyway, to further incentivize you, I'm running a prize draw for anyone that sends me a screenshot of them subscribing and listening to the new show.

And the winner of this prize draw will receive two months worth of free coaching from me,

So if you thought that you would like a mindset or business coach in your life, well, you know what to do.

Go and listen to the rest of this episode, or just join me generally

on the new show where I am chronologically going through the entire history of human invention and ingenuity up to today. , so to enter the prize you have to find the new show, how to change the World on your podcast player.

And then shoot me an email at Growth Mindset podcast@gmail.com or fill in the form for a chance to win some free coaching with me. Easy is that so hopefully I'll be talking to you soon over [00:38:00] email

and on that, have a fantastic day, week, weekend whenever you are listening to this.

Thank you so much for listening. Go you. Your consistency to reach the end of an episode is legendary, my hero. If you have any ideas or feedback for the show, I'm always interested to hear from you. You're the best studies show. We need time for information to sink in, so I'm going to give you a five second pause, silence to reflect on one idea from the show before you jump back into your busy life.

Ready and go.