How did the discovery of fires affect peoples lives?

Answer 1

http://www.tufts.edu/as/wright_center/cosmic_evolution/docs/text/text_cult_5.htmlFire The discovery of fire's usefulness is perhaps foremost among those factors that accelerated culture, its management of crucial import in the toolkit of the hominids. Our ancestors have been using fire for light, heat, and probably protection from predators for nearly a million years. Archaeological expeditions of caves in France have revealed blackened hearths at least that old. The general benefit of fire, then, was welcomed a very long time ago, at least insofar as it provided warmth in colder climates. But it seems that its functional practicality went unrecognized until more recently. The cooking of food, for example, arose only ~200,000 years ago. Techniques to fire-harden spears and anneal cutting stones are likely to have been still newer inventions. Significantly, the widespread use of fire, especially for utilitarian purposes, was one of the last great steps in the domestication of humans. Beginning not quite 10,000 years ago, our ancestors learned to extract iron from ore and convert silica into glass (at ~1800 K), as well as to cast copper (~1000 K) and harden pottery (~1200 K). Many other industrial uses were realized for fire, including the fabrication of new tools and the construction of clay homes. However, archaeologists disagree about the temporal ordering of many of these basic advances. Just when and how one invention paved the way for another is so far unclear. Some researchers argue that, after heat and light, baking clay to make pots was the oldest organized use of fire, even predating the regular cooking of food. As depicted in Figure 7.18, pottery or ceramics is a technique whereby clay is changed back into stone by dehydrating and heating it to a high enough temperature to cluster the fine mineral particles. Others maintain that the need for pottery arose because cooking was already established since the earliest uses for pottery must have been for cooking and storing food. FIGURE 7.18 - Pottery is one of the oldest cultural uses of fire. This modern mud-brick village in Afghanistan features a pottery kiln in the foreground that is similar to those dating back ~10,000 years. When cultural advances are intimately linked in this way, which was the cause and which the effect is never quite clear. Both the motivation for and the exact time of an invention are hard to establish. Some of the pivotal steps may never be pinned down. But of one thing we can be sure: Scores of new mechanical and chemical uses of fire were mastered during the past 10,000 years and a few may have been discovered well before that. Ancient clay, metal, and glass products can still be found in the bazaars and workshops of Afghanistan, China, Iraq, Thailand, Turkey, and other generally Middle-East and Asian countries. More modern results of these early technologies are evident in the cities of steel, concrete, and plastic surrounding many of us in the 21st century. Cultural changes of this sort are not without problems, however. Increasing amounts of energy expenditure, in the form of fire and its many derivatives, have often been accompanied by grim aftereffects, not least environmental pollution and energy shortages only now becoming evident in our contemporary world.

Answer 2

It affects people's lives by:

.for heat and light

.cooking

.scaring animals away