Chimps and fire

I was struck by a line in Samantha Harvey’s novel Orbital – I mean, I’m struck by almost every line in this profoundly beautiful book – but this sparked an immediate internet trawl.

‘… the only things humans can do that animals cannot is start fire from nothing.’

Harvey goes on to say that chimps could do it if they watched and learned, and then they’d be doing more human things like cooking food and moving to cooler climates.

This is a phenomenal concept. I instantly looked up whether chimpanzees could be or even had been taught how to make fire, and it appears they have been. But they have to be taught, they can’t come up with the concept themselves, nor an idea of how it could be useful to them, now or in the future. Apparently. I don’t know anything about chimps.

So that difference in cognition is the decisive element? Chimpanzees – I think probably most apes and many other animals besides – are hugely curious. A lot of them make tools and come up with solutions to problems using them. How is it that a sense of the enormous benefits of harnessing fire, despite its dangers, is such a game-changer? We can see what it did for the human species and what progressed from here, but what of this epoch making or breaking moment of cognition?

It made me think toward, if not an opposite end of the spectrum, at least a very different part of it. Can AI “think” of making fire in this way? Is it endlessly curious the way a human being is, endlessly able to put two and two together and make 500?

The fire on the tea light in this photo was not created with a piece of flint, nor an existing ember, nor a match or even a conventional lighter. It was done with some stick I recently bought that can be recharged with a usb cable that creates a little laser horseshoe like something out of a dated Frankenstein film to light the wick without fire. It’s like a toy. Every time I use it I’m amazed.

Unfortunately I can’t come up with some kind of tight and pleasing conclusion to this train of thought. I can hear some symphonic music playing on an internet radio, see the cursor blinking on my screen, see the buildings out the window and the jet trails in the unruly and insistent sky … sometimes, frequently, I’m overwhelmed by the enormity of what is in the world, and am endlessly, greedily curious about it. As a fellow human animal yourself, I’m sure you are, too.