Ancient Humans Mastered Fire. Now, Burning Fossil Fuels and Blazing Landscapes Threaten to ‘Undo the World’

In my childhood, fire had two faces. The first: friendly, vivacious, exuberant. Like a puppy with sharp teeth and too much energy, capable of doing damage but not out of malicious intent. Fire as community, as celebration, as connection. Beach bonfires made of sand-crusted driftwood, pulsing an unpredictable pattern of light and heat into the starry night, sending glimmers off the black lake. Pine-scented fires made from dried-out Christmas trees, around which my cousins and aunts and uncles and friends huddled, the flames sometimes erupting blue as a forgotten strand of tinsel burned up, nearby ice hissing as it melted. Campfires to cook hot dogs, roast vegetables wrapped in foil or toast marshmallows to the perfect shade of golden brown. Simmering prairie burns that leave the earth blackened, amplifying the sun-fed warmth to spring plants, smelling like sweet charcoal. I loved all the fires, always volunteered to get them started, wanted nothing more than to sit and watch the ripple and dance of flame till there was nothing but snapping embers.

The second: deadly, unpredictable, bad to know. House fires that killed sleeping children or leveled historic cities. Grease fires in the kitchen, subverting the normal knowledge of quenching them with water. Frayed wires allowing electrons to escape their confines and ignite furniture. Stop, drop and roll; in emergencies break glass; test the smoke detector on a regular basis. If that alarm goes off, feel the doorknob before opening your bedroom door. Block smoke with a towel. Open the window, hang from the ledge and drop if you have no other option; better to break an ankle than burn to death or die of smoke inhalation. Fire has no place indoors, except on carefully monitored candles, and the friendliness of a bonfire should not be mistaken for house-training.

Wildfires belong to this second category as well, but on a far more massive scale. They were also, notably, not a threat to my particular corner of North America; the Chicago fire of 1871 was old history by the time I moved there, even if it is represented on the city’s flag in the form of a star. We had heat waves and polar vortexes, blizzards and tornadoes, floods and droughts. I took comfort in the knowledge that fire happened in different ecological regimes.

This was, of course, some mixture of ignorance and hubris. Not only does the Chicago area have its own fire weather, but the planet shares one atmosphere, and all that travels by air makes its way across the globe in varying concentrations. The older I got, the more I understood I was not immune to wildfires. I worried for West Coast friends as fire seasons grew longer and more explosive. I spoke with forestry experts who monitored the fires on palm oil plantations in Indonesia and read about flames threatening endangered orangutans. Wildfire emissions in the boreal forests of Eurasia and North America have tripled since 2001, contributing to a 60 percent increase in forest fire carbon emissions. Even internet culture reflected the world’s out-of-control fire landscape: A cartoon of a dog in a miniature bowler hat, sitting by his mug of coffee in a room aflame, asserting, “This is fine,” became a ubiquitous meme.

During the spring and summer of 2023 and continuing through October, Canada experienced its worst wildfire season on record, with more than 18.4 million hectares burned (an area slightly larger than North Dakota). The forest fires were more than seven times larger than the average burned area recorded over the 40 years preceding them, which was attributed to the fact that 2023 was also the warmest and driest year in that same period. More than 6,000 fires burned across Canada, many triggered by lightning storms, smoldering away in remote locations across British Columbia, Quebec and the Yukon.

As conflagrations erupted, smoke and particulate matter flowed down over vast swaths of the United States. In New York, the sky turned an apocalyptic shade of orange. In the Great Lakes area, satellite imagery showed a gray haze so thick it obscured most of Lake Michigan and the state of Michigan. The spike in air pollution was so extreme and anomalous that one day in June, media outlets rushed to proclaim Chicago had the “worst air quality” of any major city. People were warned to stay indoors, or wear masks outdoors to protect their lungs against the dangerous particulate matter, due to the heightened risk of asthma attacks and lung damage. On my own brief foray outside the house, the air stung my eyes and seemed to clog my throat, even with protection from an N95 respirator. An acrid smell hung on the weave of my clothing when I returned indoors.

But the drama of wildfire smoke overshadows a more insidious reality: The air quality in Chicago has long been detrimental to the health of its residents. In 2020, researchers estimated that air pollution from vehicle traffic and industrial activity contributed to 5 percent of premature deaths in the city. As of 2025, Cook County (which includes Chicago and multiple suburban cities) was in violation of EPA air standards, with especially bad ozone and particle pollution. And it’s not the only place where air quality is hazardous or unhealthy: The American Lung Association found that more than 156 million people live in places that have received a failing grade for at least one measure of air pollution. When we think of “fire,” most people tend to forget that internal combustion engines are also burning, that coal plants are burning, that natural gas is burning.

Not Stephen J. Pyne. The fire researcher coined the term “pyrocene” to describe our current era of mega-wildfires and fossil fuel-driven climate change, a fire age instead of the ice ages that dominated the earlier history of Homo sapiens. He envisions a trio of fires on the planet. “First fire” is nature’s fire, triggered by lightning strikes, volcanoes and even rockslides generating sparks. “Second fire” is humankind’s initial relationship with fire, for food and warmth and landscape transformation. “Third fire” comes from lithic landscapes, the coal and oil and gas that were buried for eons until humans learned to harness their raw power—without necessarily understanding the ways this would undo the world.

“This was geology’s version of Jurassic Park,” Pyne says of fossil fuels, an analogy that came to him after watching one of the most recent films in the franchise and seeing dinosaurs surrounded by fire. “You’ve taken stuff out of deep time, tens of millions of years ago, and you’ve brought it to the present and released it. And it has no place to go; it doesn’t belong here. It’s not just energy from burning the fossil fuels, but all the other biomass, the petrochemicals, the plastics, the tar, the asphalt.”

On Earth, the oldest fossil charcoal dates to around 420 million years ago, relatively shortly (in geologic time) after the appearance of the first land plants. This interplay has continued ever since, with some ecosystems adapting specifically around fire in the same way others evolve around an abundance of rain. Pyrophytic, or fire tolerant, plants like lodgepole pine and eucalyptus trees have resinous cones that require fire to unseal their seeds. In fire-prone parts of South Africa, smoke can trigger germination in some plants. Multiple species of larch tree in the boreal forests of Siberia rely on fire to open the terrain for seedlings and limit the growth of evergreen conifers. Fire is destructive, but it is also generative; flame removes pests, burning resets the board for new life to take root, ash fertilizes the soil.

Surely ancient hominins saw the way fire shaped the growth of new landscapes, what happened when plants and animals burned. At some point they made the connection between the heat and light of fire and its potential as a tool. Archaeologists hypothesize that by 1.7 million years ago, when Homo erectus was expanding beyond Africa, these primordial cousins of ours may already have had some knowledge of fire. Their smaller teeth suggest access to cooked food; when meat and tubers are cooked, they’re easier to digest and more calorically dense. By one million years ago, hominins were using fire within caves, indicating they didn’t simply wait for lightning strikes to ignite the landscape—they’d learned how to transport fire.

Pyne, a self-described “pyromantic,” has worked with fire for the entirety of his career, beginning at age 18 with a fire crew at Grand Canyon National Park. He’s studied the fire regimes on every continent, learning not only from the fossil record and decades of policy on fire suppression but also Indigenous and Aboriginal fire practices.

Starting around 420,000 years ago, Qesem Cave in modern-day Israel shows evidence of habitation that lasted more than 200,000 years, and fire was present for that entire duration. Charred bones, butchering tools and even microscopic remnants of charcoal on fossilized teeth all indicate the extent to which fire was being used for cooking meat. Fire shaped the lives of our hominin ancestors. As Pyne says, it could be considered humanity’s first act of domestication.

But domestication isn’t just the act of adapting that which is wild into something beneficial to humans, as we did with fire; it’s also the practice of living together. Domestic life is what we share with kin or friends or any other chosen social group.

Fire clearly helped our species evolve and survive. What might have been equally important is the practice of community care—for the young, the elderly and the disabled. As someone who has lived with chronic illness for 15 years, I can attest firsthand to the importance of this support from friends and family. Their work helps keep me alive.

Contrary to the image of ancient life as a violent “survival of the fittest,” there is evidence for community members supporting the disabled long after these individuals offered any “utility” to the group in terms of hunting and gathering. Fossilized remains of a Neanderthal child indicate she had severe inner ear deformity, likely as a result of Down syndrome, which would’ve caused extensive hearing loss and balance issues. But the child lived past the age of 6, a feat that likely would not have been possible without support from the mother and other community members. Another individual, this one a modern human from around 11,000 years ago, was discovered to have acromesomelic dysplasia, a form of dwarfism that resulted in growth deficiency and restricted mobility at the elbows. The condition would’ve made it much harder to hunt and move over the landscape. “Yet despite these handicaps,” the researchers write, “the [individual] survived to about 17 years of age. Moreover, once he died, he was accorded special funereal treatment as evidenced by his burial in an important cave.”

And around 4,000 years ago in northern Vietnam, a young man was paralyzed from the waist down with very limited upper body mobility, yet he survived for a decade thanks to intensive community care. He likely required assistance eating and drinking, as well as for personal hygiene and transportation. And he received this care, during an era that we associate with minimal technology and brutal calculations about life and death.

Archaeologist Lorna Tilley has coined the term “bioarchaeology of care” and created a framework to help other researchers analyze the remains of sick and disabled individuals for the level of human intervention that would’ve been required to support them. Her background in health care before transitioning to archaeology was the impetus for developing this framework. As she writes, “Research into disability seeks access to experiences and behaviors which, in a living individual, are always personal, often powerful and sometimes deeply private. While the human remains at the center of study no longer retain sentient existence, the research process itself endows them with social existence.” Tilley notes that bringing such an approach to archaeology can help combat the undervaluing of caregivers, help us recontextualize the past and emphasize the existence of sick and disabled people throughout history.

Tilley’s work reminds me of the blog by disability justice organizer Mia Mingus. “We must leave evidence,” Mingus writes. “Evidence that we were here, that we existed, that we survived and loved and ached. … Evidence for each other that there are other ways to live—past survival; past isolation.” The blog itself is titled “Leaving Evidence.”

I want to believe in the infinite capacity of humans to treat the disabled with acceptance and respect. Not as disposable, not as burdens, but as complex human beings who have every right to live satisfying lives. I want an end to the cultural narrative that says it’s better to be dead than disabled. I want to look into the deep past as a source of inspiration for how we might navigate the uncertain future, because in that past I see something like love. If hominids living on an Ice Age landscape filled with diseases and food scarcity and threats from saber-toothed cats and other megafauna were able to care for their disabled kin, why shouldn’t we, in our age of fire, with our immense advances in technology, be able to do the same? There will always be threats of one sort or another, and chores and disagreements and little hurts. We can’t know for certain that love was the motivation for those ancient people who helped their kin survive disablement. But it’s what I choose to believe. It’s how I want to frame my own relationships: that we all take risks for the betterment of each other, because we create a better world when all of us are thriving.

Excerpted from Body Weather: Notes on Chronic Illness in the Anthropocene by Lorraine Boissoneault. Copyright 2026. Excerpted with permission by Beacon Press.

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