A world without fire

This is rather a thought experiment as opposed to a philosophical idea. Not that I could honestly define the difference for you all, but anyway.

I was reading a book the other day, a typical thriller type novel by a popular writer.

The situation was as follows:

You are a tiny person, in a jungle, and you can not use fire as a source of heat or light because fire attracts insects, which will kill you.

I suddenly thought what would happen on a world where fire was not the wonderful resource it is on this planet, not because it is physically impossible, but because it is too dangerous to use.

What would have become of humans if fire had not been an option, because instead of being afraid of fire, predators were attracted by it: no heat; no cooking; no smelting metals; no light in dark places; no hardening of wood or other materials; no sterilising water; no protection from predators; no attraction of like minded individuals over distances?

The thought boggled my mind.

The question then, a world without fire: What would it be (have been) like?

a reply to: Jonjonj

It would be extremely difficult. We would still be hunting and eating raw meat. Our survival rates would be much lower and life expectancy much lower. Mankind may have gone extinct without fire. In fact I would bet that without fire we would have been out competed by other creatures.

what would be the state of hominid society , sans fire ?

pretty low key - we would still have flint tools etc - and a defintie lead over the other primates

but i dont envision any agriculture - so we would just be the most advanced bands of primate hunter gatheres on the savanah

It would be a world of darkness with a much higher population of centipedes, spiders, bed-bugs, and all type of creatures that hide in darkness and feed off of others.

Shere Khan would've eaten Mowgli, that's for certain.

We would adapt to what we have to work with. Just think you don't need a boiler to heat a house, there are techniques such as solar heating of water. We would use more insulation in our clothing to counteract the absence of fire. Also fire isn't needed to cook certain foods such as meat & fish, fish & certain meats can be left in lemon juice which cooks the meat using its acidic properties. In an alternate timeline at this point in time human civilization would look a lot different than it does in our current timeline, I assume we will either have different technology for keeping houses warm or we will be semi subterranean too take advantage of geothermal energy however we would still be able to use electricity to power electric ovens and lighting so maybe it wouldn't be so different.

PS - My question I have is what happens when fire is used? do a certain species of insect materialize into existence and insta kill you with a sting? in that case war would probably be a lot different. You would see more money being used to make cities 100% fireproof and more money into weapons of war which use fire, a couple of napalm strikes on a less developed city could wipe nearly half their population out.

a reply to: Jonjonj

I am sure our superior brain would kick in gear and allow us to visualize how to use fire to capture these insects/predators and use them as we will.

originally posted by: Joecanada11
a reply to: Jonjonj

It would be extremely difficult. We would still be hunting and eating raw meat. Our survival rates would be much lower and life expectancy much lower. Mankind may have gone extinct without fire. In fact I would bet that without fire we would have been out competed by other creatures.

I agree that the world would have been a much different place. So many things would have simply not taken place, particularly making things from metals and such like, which would have had a definite negative effect on technology production.

Our whole development would have been reduced to a crawl I think.

originally posted by: ignorant_ape
what would be the state of hominid society , sans fire ?

pretty low key - we would still have flint tools etc - and a defintie lead over the other primates

but i dont envision any agriculture - so we would just be the most advanced bands of primate hunter gatheres on the savanah

Agreed again. The point I wanted to make was not that there was no such thing as fire, but rather that the use of fire lead to extremely dangerous situations.

I wonder if we would, somehow, have learned how to hide our use of fire, would the advantages of fire have been too many to ignore, and how would that have panned out

Or like you and others have said: the best of a bad bunch, not really going anywhere, not really doing anything.

It does seem to me that fire has been absolutely crucial to our development.

originally posted by: AntisocialAnxiety
Shere Khan would've eaten Mowgli, that's for certain.

This made me lol. Would he though? Maybe he wouldn't have found Mowgli, what with him not giving any clues to his whereabouts...hiding in a cave or something!

originally posted by: kingofthesouth

PS - My question I have is what happens when fire is used? do a certain species of insect materialize into existence and insta kill you with a sting? in that case war would probably be a lot different. You would see more money being used to make cities 100% fireproof and more money into weapons of war which use fire, a couple of napalm strikes on a less developed city could wipe nearly half their population out.

Ah no, that wasn't what I was really getting at. What I wanted to express was that fire attracted, rather than frightened animals, particularly the large predators.

originally posted by: InTheLight
a reply to: Jonjonj

I am sure our superior brain would kick in gear and allow us to visualize how to use fire to capture these insects/predators and use them as we will.

That is an interesting point, would we have developed quickly enough to let us work out how to use fire to corral predators?Given that we would be attracting them a lot, would we opt to just destroy those most dangerous species, if we could?