0145 The domestication of fire takes place over a few hundred thousand years.  The period is pivotal.

Here is the list.

0146 Fire sparks the imagination.

Chapter ten, concerning fire, sits close to the middle of the text.  It stands at near center.  Mithen asks whether the domestication of fire parallels the adoption of spoken words in human evolution.  Mithen is fascinated by the question, asking, “What types of linguistic practices are enticed by fire.”

0147 But, the implications of fire for hominin evolution goes beyond linguistic practices.

To me, the first implication is that more teams are possible when food is cooked with fire.  Intense heat breaks down structural barriers in both plants and meats in ways that cultivated decay does not.

More opportunities for gathering food open up.  More teams are successful.  To an evolutionary anthropologist, this means more teams (15), increasing relevance of community (150) and bigger brain volumes (as natural selection operates to routinize the abilities and dispositions for each team).

0148 That said, Mithen’s fixation on linguistic practices offers a relevant second implication.

0149 In this examination, in the period between the start of bipedalism (3.5 Myr) and the domestication of fire (0.8-0.6 Myr), proto-linguistic hand-talk adapts to the social circle of the team.  Proto-linguistic hand talk facilitates sensible construction.  Sensible construction hones the content and the situation levels of a three-level interscope, because the team itself constitutes the a stable perspective level.

0150 The following compressed nested form tells the tale.

The normal context of collaborative team activity_3b,3a bring the actualities of lexical and grammatical hand talk_2a,2binto relation with the potentials of ‘locking in_1a, and assembling_1b a big picture_1c‘.

Surely, this compound nested-form addresses two questions.  What is happening?_3a  What does it mean to me?_3b

0151 The domestication of fire creates a new venue for hand-talk, initiating (what Michael Tomasello calls) the third period of hominin evolution.

This is the topic of chapter ten.

0152 Or, I should say, “These items should be the topic of chapter ten.”

But, the chapter is very short.

Besides archaeological evidence for the domestication of fire, Mithen only explicitly mentions “night talk”.  Other aspects are inferred (but not explicitly developed) when the author mentions technical innovations in stone tools that accompany and follow the domestication of fire.

0153 So, for the next section, I will take this examination in the direction that the author subtly and implicitly indicates, but clearly and explicitly rules out.

What happens when language evolves in the milieu of hand-talk?