At the fire, you are safe

At the weekend we celebrated our daughter's birthday. She had wished to play "Werewolves of Düsterwald" with her friends, a role-playing game that needs at least 8 people. 10 or 12 would be better. That far exceeds the capacity of a kid's room at home, so we had to come up with an alternative.

So we rented a barbecue spot in the neighboring village, a fire pit with a swing grill in a pavilion with seating all around, and invited everyone to the "Werewolves and Sausages" event. The kids were thrilled.

Open fire in a brick fire pit, with a lawn and bushes behind it

They could run and romp around, swing and climb on a small playground next door, and look for walking sticks in a little patch of woods. And of course they could play Werewolf.

When, after a round through the woods, they flopped panting onto the benches and asked for sausages, one of the kids said, "At the fire you are always safe." All the others nodded in agreement and gazed thoughtfully into the fire.

Interesting, because probably none of the kids had ever been so exposed to the wilderness that a fire was the only place they felt safe. Reason enough to look into where that comes from. And while doing so, I discovered something interesting.

Warmth, light, protection and food

Children sit at a bench in a pavilion, in the foreground a brick grill with sausages on the swing grate. The faces are blurred.

Of course, this feeling comes from a long-gone time. For at least a million years, humans have been making fire, and always for the same reasons:

The obvious part first. Fire gives warmth, provides light and is also considered protection from predators, which avoid flames and smoke.

That is, of course, important for our physical survival, but also for orientation and defense.

Then comes food. Cooked food is easier to chew and to digest. The anthropologist Richard Wrangham even suspects that cooking drove our evolution forward: the body gets more energy out of cooked food, and our large brain needs that energy. This is a hypothesis, not an established finding.

What is established is that the history is long. In Africa there are signs of fire use by Homo erectus from at least 1.5 million years ago, though only indirect ones, such as charcoal and burned bones. From Gesher Benot Ya‘aqov in Israel come fish that were apparently cooked about 780,000 years ago. So our sausages on sticks belong to a pretty long tradition.

Five jobs in one place

Four of these five jobs were absolutely clear to me, and the fifth one at least in outline, but not yet in depth.

Warmth
Protection
Light
Food
Stories

The evening is part of it

With fire, the day got longer. Where darkness would have ended things, there were now hours to sit together. And this is where it gets most interesting for me, also as a change storyteller.

The anthropologist Polly Wiessner studied what the Ju/’hoansi in northwestern Botswana talk about during the day and what they talk about in the evening at the fire. The differences are clear.

By day people complain and plan. At the fire they tell stories.

During the day, conversations were mostly about complaints, criticism and gossip (34 percent) and about economic topics such as hunting (31 percent). Stories made up only 6 percent. In the evening at the fire, it was 81 percent.

Wiessner concludes that these stories keep values and rules alive, for example sharing food in times of need. They also feed the imagination: whoever listens to stories can picture people and places that are far away.

During the day, complaining and criticizing serve a purpose: enforcing norms, reducing jealousy, settling disputes. Wiessner sees criticism as a precondition for people being able to live together at all. When a dispute was not settled, people moved on.

In the evening it is different. Women and men tell stories, mostly about people everyone knows. There are no heroes being celebrated and no raised index fingers. One example from the study: a current marital conflict was discussed during the day, and in the evening people told stories about earlier marriages.

Wiessner says these stories foster compassion, trust, understanding, sociability and humor. She also suspects that storytelling strengthens the ability to put oneself in other people's shoes and to recognize how they think.

At the latest when I wrote my book, I dealt a lot with storytelling, with its origins, backgrounds and techniques, but this difference between day and evening I need to look at more closely again.