Which came first - flint or wood?

[BOD]

Apologies if this has been argued elsewhere but what do you, as practitioners, think - was fire first made with flint and rocks or by rubbing two sticks together?

I know what the anthropologists say but they are probably not practioners.

 

[Draven]

It's kinda hard to say.
One must wonder, what was the most likely "accident"; Knocking two rocks together and getting a spark and thinking "Blimey, that's hot! Maybe I'll throw one of those babies into a lump of fungus and get me some warmth!" or realising that if you rub two of anything together, it gets hot?

I think fire-by-friction is a much more likely accidental find than sparks from flint (especially since it can take a very long time for an inexperienced person to get a fire from flint) and if we're ruling out divine intervention or instinctual knowledge, by accident seems the most likely way to discover either methods.

Peace

 

[Justin Time]

I have this image in my head of one of our ancestors knocking a bit of flint with a stone and getting a burn on the legs from the spark... the stone of course containing iron pyrites... but then I don't know what would have come first... making flint tools or making fire?

 

[Eric_Methven]

It was a guy named Ug, third cave from the left. He liked rubbing himself up against other femail neandertals 'cos it made him feel all warm and cosy. One day, one of the femails said "Stop that you plank". He stopped and started rubbing himself up against a plank. He didn't like that - the splinters hurt. Then he started rubbing one plank against another plank and felt warm again, at least his fingers did as he found they had caught fire. So, fire by friction came first, invented by Ug. Ug was cheesed off though as the concept of patents hadn't yet been thought of. He could have made a fortune.

Eric (Last residues of cabin fever ebbing away).

 

[jon r]

nice theory there Eric