Heat (14 page)

Franklin was asked to patent his stove. He refused. “As we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others,” he wrote, “we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously.”

I am alone. No one can see what I do. I spit on my stove and watch the spit turn to steam. I smell nothing. Franklin’s spitters, I conclude, may have been tobacco chewers.

Into my stove I toss a chemistry textbook. I watch the cover melt. The fire reduces twelve hundred pages to heat and ash and smoke. The formula for cyclohexyl methyl ether burns, as do those of various aldehydes and ketones and esters. The molecular structure of allylic free radicals, illustrated by stick figures, burns. “Heating oil,” the book says, “is a mixture of hydrocarbons in the 14 to 18 carbon range.” The sentence burns. Entire processes go up in smoke: reactions of epoxides and alkenylbenzenes, conversion of alcohols to ethers, protein synthesis.

People who heat their homes with wood are fond of saying that their fuel warms twice. “They warmed me twice,” wrote Thoreau in 1854, “once while I was splitting them, and again when they were on fire.” But this is an incomplete statement. Wood warms at least three times. The third time it warms the earth. A quarter cord of cedar becomes something like two thousand pounds of carbon emissions. My four-pound chemistry textbook, burning, becomes something like thirteen pounds of carbon emissions, each of its carbon atoms weighed down by two oxygen atoms that more than triple its weight. But now it is mostly gas, out of sight, its intellectual content reduced to ash, steam, soot, and carbon dioxide.

Zoroaster was a man of the Bronze Age, from a time well before Christ. He believed in a single benevolent god, in a world where good had to fight to prevail over evil, a world in which humans could actively support the side of good through appropriate thoughts and words and deeds.

The Zoroastrians built a myth of three Great Fires that have existed throughout time. They built domed fire temples with actual fires. They maintained the fires, which involved a steady supply of fuelwood and prayer. The fires could be moved from place to place as the exigencies of history required. In the tenth century, the Zoroastrians moved from the Middle East to India, and they may have carried a sacred fire with them, or at least its ashes. Through fire, they believed, one could find wisdom.

In India, they became the Parsis. From there, they spread further afield. Parsis, and therefore Zoroastrians, live in scattered communities throughout the world. The Londoner Farrokh Bulsara, also known as Freddie Mercury, front man for Queen, composer of “Bohemian Rhapsody,” “Somebody to Love,” and “We Are the Champions,” was of Parsi descent. His album
Queen on Fire
was recorded live during the 1982 Hot Space Tour.

Freddie Mercury, when alive, was not the only Zoroastrian in London. There were, in fact, enough Zoroastrians in London to justify a fire temple in West Hampstead.

I am neither a Parsi nor a Zoroastrian, but I am intrigued by the possibility of moving fire from place to place, an eternal flame, a torch, an elimination of the need to rub two sticks together. People once carried embers in pouches of various kinds. The Iceman of the Alps, who lay frozen near the Italian-Austrian border for five thousand years before being found by German hikers, carried embers.

The Iceman’s ember pouch was made from birch bark. I make mine from a scrap of deer hide lined with birch bark. From my fire, I scoop an ember, two inches in diameter and three inches long, glowing red. I drop it into my pouch, then cinch the top closed, cutting off the air supply. I set it aside until the following morning. I open it. The ember is black and cold, reduced to a frigid lump of charcoal, as useful for starting a fire as a drill and bow in the hands of an incompetent suburban skier.

I would fail as a Neanderthal, I would fail as a Zoroastrian priest, and I would fail as an Iceman.

The Asháninka people live in parts of Brazil and Peru. An Asháninka cookbook might include recipes for meat cooked in a monkey’s stomach and river turtle eggs cooked with turtle meat in the turtle’s shell. And there is frog boiled in bamboo: gut freshly caught frogs, wash and salt the carcasses, place the salted carcasses and a bit of water in a pipe of bamboo, seal the bamboo pipe with herbs, and heat to boiling over an open fire. Serve warm with boiled manioc or cassava or yucca, or with roasted bananas.

The question is this: how did the ancestral ape as a raw foodist become a cooking ape, an ape capable of controlling fire and cooking elaborate dishes, haute cuisine like frog boiled in bamboo and chocolate mousse and bouillabaisse and andouillette and seafood paella with a squid ink sauce?

It may have been the control of fire first, and then cooking. The ancestor may have found comfort in the light and warmth that came from the fires of lightning strikes and lava flows, and he may have nourished that fire when he could, and at some point found it useful for cooking. Or the ancestor may first have found fire because of its ability to cook prey.

The ancestor’s teeth—his dentition—show that he was omnivorous, an eater of leaves and roots and fruits, but also of raw bugs and raw mammals and raw fish. The ancestor was hungry. And he was resourceful. He could see a forest burning, flushing before it injured animals, half cooked, and he could find burned-over carcasses, fully cooked.

Modern apes and monkeys will approach fires. In captivity, they handle burning sticks. They slam burning brands against the ground to send up sparks. Some smoke cigarettes. Whatever innate fear of fire exists can be overcome with the right motivation. They will also eat, preferentially, cooked food. They like cooked carrots and potatoes and meat. Even chimpanzees that had never before eaten meat were found to prefer it cooked to raw. What is true of modern apes was likely true of ancient man.

Homo habilis
—named by Louis Leakey to mean “handy man”—wandered the earth just over two million years ago, among the first of the genus
Homo,
among the first that science recognizes as being one of us or nearly one of us. His teeth were smaller and his brain was bigger than those of his more primitive ancestors, the
Australopithecines.
He may have spent a substantial amount of time in trees, but he also made tools.
Homo erectus
came next, Peking man, walking upright with locking knees less than two million years ago. And then came
Homo sapiens,
a few hundred thousand years ago, his skull expanded, his ability to make tools and grow crops and build cities and manufacture bombs uncontested. But all of this oversimplifies the truth. The truth carries the burden of extinct cousins, lines that were human, more or less, but died out, or lines that might have been transitional between other lines. There is
Homo antecessor,
found in Spain and England, a bit more than a million years old, and
Homo cepranensis,
known from a single skullcap found in Italy, about five hundred thousand years old, both maybe somehow linked to
Homo heidelbergensis,
from around six hundred thousand years ago, who may have been the final link between
Homo erectus
and
Homo sapiens.
Homo heidelbergensis
may also have been the link to
Homo neanderthalensis,
Neanderthal man, an offshoot that went extinct, a cousin rather than a grandfather, but a cousin very handy with tools and fire, a cousin who interbred with early
Homo sapiens,
with Cro-Magnon man.

By the time
Homo sapiens
showed up, fire was widely used.
Homo erectus
had used fire in Swartkrans Cave and Koobi Fora. The hand axes and bones found amid burned olives and barley and grapes at Bnot Ya’akov Bridge come from the time of
Homo erectus.
By the time of
Homo sapiens,
fire was part of everyday life.
Homo sapiens
was born halfway down the on-ramp to climate change.

Richard Wrangham, a Harvard primatologist, an ape studying apes, argues that fire and cooking drove human evolution. The emergence of cooking led to the emergence of modern man, the rapid changes that characterized the road from
Homo habilis
to
Homo sapiens.
Cooking provided access to otherwise inedible stuff. Tough meats became chewable, hard shells cracked, and certain poisonous plant compounds were neutralized. Maybe more importantly, cooking increased the energy yield of food. “Cooking,” Wrangham wrote, “increases the amount of energy our bodies obtain from food.” Drippings lost to the fire were made up for in the digestive process.

Take meat as an example. Connective tissue makes it tough. Connective tissue is collagen and elastin, fibrous protein and rubbery protein. It is skin and fat and the stuff that holds the body together in neat little compartments. Heat collagen, and it falls apart. At around 150 degrees, collagen molecules lose their shape, they unravel, they melt, they become Jell-O. They become easier to cut, easier to chew, and easier to digest.

The body extracts most of its useful energy supply from food in the stomach and small intestine. Undigested food finding its way into the large intestine intact is of little value. An ape eating cooked food has an advantage over an ape eating raw food. The cooking ape produces more offspring than the raw-foodist ape.

Charles Darwin once described cooking as the second most important discovery after that of language.

From Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, author of
The Physiology of Taste
, a book published in 1825 that remains in print today: “A man does not live on what he eats, an old proverb says, but on what he digests.”

From Richard Wrangham: “The introduction of cooking may well have been the decisive factor in leading man from a primarily animal existence into one that was more fully human.”

A quarter million years ago, someone left thick ash and hearth stones in a cave in Israel. That someone may have been
Homo erectus
or
Homo heidelbergensis.
A hundred thousand years later, someone cooked an elephant, leaving behind charred bones and ash. This someone was
Homo sapiens,
or his cousin
Homo neanderthalensis,
species that evolved from the beginning with a knowledge of fire and cooking.