Members of genus Homo are the only animals known to create and control
fire. The adaptive significance of this unique behavior is broadly
recognized, but the steps by which our ancestors evolved pyrotechnic
abilities remain unknown. Many hypotheses attempting to answer this
question attribute hominin fire to serendipitous, even accidental,
discovery. Using recent paleoenvironmental reconstructions, we present
an alternative scenario in which, 2 to 3 million years ago in tropical
Africa, human fire dependence was the result of adapting to
progressively fire-prone environments. The extreme and rapid
fluctuations between closed canopy forests, woodland, and grasslands
that occurred in tropical Africa during that time, in conjunction with
reductions in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, changed the fire
regime of the region, increasing the occurrence of natural fires. We
use models from optimal foraging theory to hypothesize benefits that
this fire-altered landscape provided to ancestral hominins and link
these benefits to steps that transformed our ancestors into a genus of
active pyrophiles whose dependence on fire for survival contributed to
its rapid expansion out of Africa...
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