Ever wonder how friction fire came about?

I have. I believe we can only speculate but I searched on the internet and came across this:http://www.primitiveways.com/fire.html
Interesting article. What are your thoughts?

DomC

I picture a time when there were no cell phones, internet, video games, cars, etc. ALL you had were sticks. That's all your ancestors had. That's all you and your children would ever have. Your entire existence was working with sticks. Maybe you were trying to grind one down and you realized how hot the end was getting. You'd seen fire before from a forest fire and you connected fire, heat, and friction from sticks. Logically, more friction equals more heat, so you search for the most efficient ways to create more friction. Eventually you stumble upon hand drill, bow drill, and plow drill methods.

When you start working with primitive skills you find that there are a lot of other activities that require the use of spindle drilling techniques other than fire building.

Fire was probably the side effect of some kid trying to mimic an adult attempting to drill a hole through a piece of wood, shell or bone with a spindle drill. The kid did not know what he was doing and rather than getting a nice clean hole he wound up with smoke and a coal.

The he started giggling, got smacked for playing with fire and the adult said "how'd you do that?" and confiscated his coal.

You want to freak yourself out try to figure out how the first iron was smelted by people without prior knowledge of the process. You simply can not make iron accidentally.

When you start studying primitive societies you will find that they are not real big on experimentation and do not handle change well. If a process works they are not much for trying different ways to do that process "better". The same group of people that first used fire also held onto the same tool technology for almost 200,000 years before anyone came up with the idea of putting a wooden handle on the axe head.

It appears that Cro-Magnon man was the first human that exhibited a "WOW factor" when seeing something new, or really did the inductive/deductive reasoning thing to develop new gear. Once they developed a technique it appears to have spread world wide very quickly. Just imagine the atal-atal going viral.

In Africa the natives locate one specific species of beetle larvae under a certain kind of bush. They dig up the grubs and remove the outer shell. Then they smash the larvae up and use that as a toxin for their poison tipped arrows. How would you have been able to find that out in the first place without prior knowledge?!?

I know that in a lot of cultures, like china and india, they use "eastern medicine", which is basically like unconventional medicine that is not validated by modern science. They say rhino horn can do any number of things, when it probably does absolutely nothing.

I have a feeling that humans have been eating, crushing up, wiping, smearing, burning, inhaling, and imbibing nearly every combination of natural materials they can get their hands on. Sometimes they would discover something useful. Sometimes they would think it was useful, even when it wasn't. And most times it was just a failure and learning experience. A billion people over a million years can do a WHOLE LOT of experimenting.

the history of maple syrup has been on the top of my mind because it takes gallons of raw material and days of boiling it down to get a cup of syrup

Ancient aliens.........?

I wonder about Preparation "A"......