Why Ancient Humans Spent Every Night Around Fire (It Wasn't Warmth)

#ancienthumans #prehistory #humanhistory Why Ancient Humans Spent Every Night Around Fire (It Wasn't Warmth) All research and sources are linked below. 📚 RESEARCH & SOURCES: ▸ Firelight talk — "Embers of society: Firelight talk among the Ju/'hoansi Bushmen" (2014, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences). Polly Wiessner compared 174 day and nighttime conversations. Daytime talk centred on economic matters and gossip that regulated social relations. Night talk went to stories, imagination, distant relatives and cultural institutions. She also searched the eHRAF ethnographic database and found the same daytime pattern described across 38 primarily hunter-gatherer societies. ▸ Central place foraging — Hadza and Ju/'hoansi individuals leave camp on round-trip foraging bouts and return to the same place, scattering across several kilometres during daylight. A sexual division of labour is universal among hunter-gatherers, and Hadza women's foraging paths tend to be shorter and more linear while men's run longer and more sinuous. ▸ Camp size — Frank Marlowe recorded an average Hadza camp size of 21 people. The Dobe Ju/'hoansi camp Richard Lee studied had around 35 residents. ▸ The price of light — William Nordhaus of Yale calculated what light has cost people across history, measured in hours of labour. An open fire produces roughly 0.00235 lumens per watt. Palaeolithic people worked an estimated 58 hours, mostly gathering wood, to produce 1,000 lumen-hours of light. By 1800 that was about 5.4 hours. By 1900, about 0.22 hours. By 1992, about 0.00012 hours. ▸ Household light consumption — around 1800, a typical person consumed roughly 8.4 lumen-hours of light per day, a little over 3,000 lumen-hours a year. ▸ Electric light — Edison's Pearl Street station lit about a square mile of Lower Manhattan in 1882. ———————————————— PEOPLE & SITES MENTIONED IN THIS VIDEO: ▸ William Nordhaus — The Yale economist who worked out what light actually cost people across four thousand years, measured in the only currency comparable across that span: how long you had to work to get it. His numbers are the spine of this video. Fifty-eight hours of labour for one unit of light in the Palaeolithic. Effectively nothing today. ▸ Polly Wiessner — Spent decades with the Ju/'hoansi in the Kalahari and compared what people talked about during the day with what the same people talked about at night. The two turned out not to be the same conversation at all. She called the study exploratory, and it covers one group in one place. ▸ The Hadza — Hunter-gatherers of northern Tanzania whose daily movement has been tracked in detail. Their camps empty every morning as people leave on foraging trips of different lengths in different directions, and refill every evening. ▸ The Ju/'hoansi — A hunting and gathering people of the Kalahari, on the border between Namibia and Botswana, and one of the closest looks anyone has at how human nights worked before electricity. ▸ Central place foraging — The pattern where everybody leaves from one point and everybody returns to it, but spends the hours in between scattered alone or in pairs across kilometres of landscape. It is why a camp of twenty-five people is not twenty-five people for most of the day. ———————————————— 0:00 Four people, four rooms 1:09 The camp empties at sunrise 2:07 Scattered across kilometres 2:46 The argument that waited all day 3:46 Teaching by firelight 4:28 What light actually cost 5:15 Eight hours of light a day 6:12 You still have the hour ———————————————— 🎨 Animation by Finn Explains ———————————————— #ancienthumans #prehistory #humanhistory #archaeology #stoneage #anthropology #history #explainer #animation #education #paleolithic #huntergatherer #firelight #family #humanevolution #nordhaus #electricity