THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF MEAT

On October 5, 1789, the women of the central Parisian marketplace, Les
Halles, marched all night to Versailles to “bring home the baker.” These selfelected representatives of the working poor took action to remedy what to them was a political crisis: The price of bread and meat had risen beyond what was just, and their king had neglected one of his primary duties to ensure the subsistence of his people. This popular initiative pointed to the political necessity of food staples, an urgent need that required direct confrontation with the head of state. Once in Versailles, they made their demands clear to Louis XVI (r. 1774–1792) and subsequently the National Assembly. The assembly responded with decrees prohibiting the export of grain, setting the price of wheat at 24 livres a muid and the price of meat at no more than 8 sous a pound. A flower seller in the Palais Royal district, who claimed to be the head of the band of women, said that she had a private audience with the king, who, having sanctioned the assembly’s decrees,embraced her and sought that she and her fatigued and hungry compatriots return to Paris by royal coach. Interestingly enough, these women were satisfied only when their monarch (known to Parisians as the great provisioner) agreed to return with them to liberate Paris from the future designs of the aristocracy and, most importantly, to feed them. Faced with these demands, the king responded by accommodating the crowd, which included male volunteers of the Bastille, Lafayette, and the National Guard, with “all the bread and meat that could be had.” Far more than simply giving them bread, “the staff of life,” Louis furnished them with meat, what most Parisians understood to be an absolute necessity as it was “one of the most common foodstuffs after bread.”1

The Paradox of Meat: Luxury or Necessity?

Historians of early modern France have long considered meat an object of
status and luxury rather than a subsistence good. Long-term studies of
French agricultural production, prices, and population have pointed to a
period rich in meat followed by general decline beginning in 1550 with little change until the nineteenth century.2 The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were marked by popular revolts and political crises sparked, in large part, by grain shortages and sudden rises in the price of bread. Most scholars would agree that the “grain-dependent French” fixated upon their ability to purchase bread not meat, as it was the basic measure of popular budgets in the Old Regime.3 The predominant historical thesis that explains popular action among the Paris crowds has focused on the cries for bread that clearly dominated any common craving for meat.4
How much meat did people eat in Old Regime France? Consider the peasant population, whose resources were limited by obligations to the lord of the manor, the church’s tithe, and the royal tax collector who, even in the best of circumstances, may have poached small game from the lord’s lands and raised their own chickens (for eggs) and swine (which they cured and smoked). The vast majority subsisted on barley, oats, chestnuts, and root
vegetables. Meat was not a centerpiece of the peasant’s meal, but remained
a condiment with which they flavored their soups and a feast-day supplement
to what was a meager diet.
By comparison, the people living in towns and small cities with larger markets and more developed economies had greater resources. Nearly every major town throughout France supported a legally sworn butcher trade and an urban population that depended upon victualers of all sorts to furnish them with their basic needs. The Venetian ambassador to the court of Henry III observed that shopkeepers and artisans, even small-scale ones, wanted to eat leg of mutton, capon, and partridge. Jean-Jacques Hémardinquer posits that Paris, like other early modern cities, was as much a center of independent animal raising as it was a consumer center. His scattered evidence on the family pig suggests that artisans and workers, even in dense urban areas of Paris, raised small numbers of farm animals for their
own consumption.5
Butcher’s meat, on the other hand, was unique as an urban commodity and, compared with other urban locales, Paris was its privileged city. Recent
studies on food provisioning underscore the capital’s preeminence as a central market, showing the rise of annual per capita consumption for Parisians from 52 kilograms at the mid-seventeenth century to 62 kilograms at the end of the eighteenth century. Where in smaller cities, such as Caen whose surrounding Normandy region boasted a growing livestock trade,the level remained only 20 to 30 kilograms.6 This Parisian exceptionalism is demonstrated not only by the scope and scale of this great marketplace, but by the expansion of commercial life that came in conflict with a powerful group of guild merchants. As later chapters will show, the butcher trade’s multilayered regulatory apparatus focused on maintaining the dominance of a powerful core of guild merchants and fending off competition from unlicensed butchers.
Royal policymakers understood the need both to supply and to regulate the meat trade for the well being of all Parisians. Its aim was to ensure meat
was plentiful, healthful, and affordable. According to a 1719 royal declaration concerning the regulation of Parisian butcher stalls, the crown
announced “a singular attention to procure for their subjects and principal
inhabitants of our good city of Paris the abundance and cheapness of goods
[butcher’s meat] necessary for their subsistence.”7 As stalls and shops
opened throughout the city and meat became more readily available by the
end of the eighteenth century, ministers were more apt to see this normative vision of meat for the masses in regard to popular expectations. Bertin’s acknowledgment that butcher’s meat represented, “for the people of Paris, a commodity in some sort of first necessity, as is white bread” put into words the Parisian idea of subsistence that went beyond the people’s needs to the more refined tastes for white bread and butcher’s meat. Those who held the greatest influence over the meat trade—the royal administrators and officers who regulated commerce as well as the influential urban elites who consumed the greatest proportion of the meat supply—were the ones who ultimately determined whether or not meat was a good of first necessity.
One explanation for why elites assumed the ubiquity of meat can be linked to its historical meaning as what stands for all that is edible, if not the elemental ingredient that made up a meal. Until the seventeenth century, dictionaries defined “la viande” as the general term for solid food. In Jean Nicot’s Thresor de la langue francoyse (1606), la viande corresponded to all forms of nourishment, not simply meat, as Nicot cites the common usage, “all viande other than bread and wine.”8 The meaning of viande evolved from this basic nutrient to a meaning that was further defined by its constitutive matter (flesh), an essential part of the meal; more commonly, it referred to what is served as the centerpiece of the dining experience.9
What finished the meal (dessert) and what negated a normal meal of meat
(literally, a day of fish, un jour de poisson) had to be made explicit. In this sense, viande operated as the fundamental ingredient as well as the common term for meal.10
The significance of meat as the meal par excellence extended to other
idiomatic expressions used at the court of Louis XIV (r. 1661–1715) where
the royal meal became “the king’s meat” (la viande du Roi). When bringing
forth the numerous platters of roasts and terrines that made up the French
service, the palace’s kitchen staff paraded through the halls of Versailles, shouting, “La viande du Roi est servie! C’est la viande du Roi!” The announcement rang out to all the courtiers to come eat; the service of the king’s meal (or meat) would soon begin.11 This call to feast was a call for meat in the broadest sense—a majestic presentation of the essential prepared food— a food that embraced the idea of the meal.

The Political Economy of Meat 9

Elites claimed meat was as much a necessity as bread most likely because
for them it was. This staple food had long been the centerpiece of every
meal. Feasts that featured overflowing platters of roasted meat and game
stood as one of the avatars of the nobility. The act of eating and drinking
with another held an important place in fulfilling the expectations of hospitality and confirming the fellowship of noble rank. Even wealthy commoners could at least live nobly through the conspicuous consumption of this elite food. The politically influential became arguably the trade’s most demanding overseers even as the extent of popular consumption of fresh
meat varied enormously. Although the privileged were unlikely to emulate
bread riots by going out into the streets, through their own more inconspicuous connections they made clear the value of regulation to ensure a constant, healthy supply.
The need to provision Paris with butcher’s meat, even as a good of first
necessity, did not translate into a unified policy. Throughout the eighteenth century, the fiscal needs of the government often conflicted with the provisioning obligations of royal officials in determining the priority of meat as a foodstuff and its place in the economy. At one level, government leaders and intellectual elites regarded a plentiful and healthful meat supply as part of the obligations of city leaders, even though they knew its unregulated circulation made it particularly susceptible to corruption. These aspects encouraged ministers to intervene on the behalf of consumers, capitalizing on the value of meat that made it an important measure of social standing for Parisians. Simultaneously, this rhetoric masked policies that sought to extract as much wealth from an agricultural surplus with burdensome tax policies and strict market rules. By demarcating and controlling the traffic in cattle, tax farmers (as royal officers) gained a significant source of revenue for the crown. Going against this line of action was the paternalistic manner in which the government put forth provisioning policies: dictating meat be fresh, healthful, and sold at a just price. In many ways, the political economy of meat demonstrated the contradictions of Old Regime food policy caught between a tradition of kingship that served the public good, and the reaches of the state that sought greater sources of national wealth and
centralized power.

Meat and the Public Good

Since the king first imposed his will on the Parisian butcher guild in the
twelfth century,12 the importance of meat coincided with the paternalistic
obligations of government to feed its people. Magistrates and royal officers,following the king’s lead, expressed their moral responsibility in overseeing the food supply for the common good. According to Steven Kaplan, more than the service of a monarchical leader to his common subjects, “provisioning acted as the social contract that bound the king to his people.”13 The failure to ensure an adequate food supply could jeopardize the public trust, or at worst, the crown’s legitimacy. These obligations went beyond notions of Christian charity to the essentials of public service. The lieutenant general of police and his neighborhood commissaires as officers of the crown performed an important role in serving the basic needs of the public.14 They intervened when the trade threatened the safety of Parisians, policing the markets and stalls to ensure the quality, quantity, and price of butcher’s meat. Their regulations followed the rules of early modern kingship that centered on providing for “the public good” (le bien public),15 a responsibility that included the basic necessities of life. The monarch (who embodies the state) serves for the good of his state, putting his particular interest beneath the public interest.
The state’s jurisdiction over the public interest is no better defined than in the Traité de la police.
Nicolas Delamare (1639–1723) compiled four volumes on urban policing
that included centuries of legal precedents along with the author’s own commentary.
Delamare meant for his work to be read as a source of jurisprudence, “entirely devoted to the common good, and for a number of reasons merits a singular attention.”16 In the introduction to his treatise, he attempts to outline the code of law that unifies the public weal. He emphasizes what is just for “the good order upon which depends the fortunes of state,”17 in particular, “the conduct of man in regards to his spirit and in his heart—to procure for himself the goods of substance . . . [that among these are] health, food provisions, clothing, housing, the ease of travel, and the protection against attacks, that could threaten one’s life, or disturb one’s peace. . . .”18
Thus, he establishes the minimum requirements that must be guaranteed by
the police. Such a platitude soars far above the hard realities Delamare
would have experienced as a Paris commissaire. As he noted later in the
treatise, “one would have trouble imagining that there are sources capable
of filling this vast pit.”19
In Delamare’s high theoretical vision of the public good, the concerns
for meat differed from bread; more specifically, they bypassed issues of
subsistence, to focus on the quality of urban life where large populations
depended upon public servants to ensure a level of health and safety. A
significant part of his attention centered on the surveillance of food trades that fulfilled basic needs for a large urban community like Paris. The commerce in meat appears throughout the treatise as meat touched on almost every police concern. For instance “Religion,” in Book 2, outlines the rules that regulated meat eating during fast days. The following book, “Customs,” devoted to a discussion of manners and customs, explains the evolution of sumptuary laws surrounding meat consumption. In Book 4,
“Health,” Delamare focuses on the regulation of the slaughterhouses and
butcheries as a source of pollution and contagion, as well as for the establishment of standards of quality for fresh meat. The final book, “Transport,” touches upon the traffic on public streets and highways and maintenance of order in the commerce of livestock. Perhaps the place where butchers and their trade figured most prominently is in Book 5, “Victuals,” where Delamare outlines the policing of food that begins with grains and follows with meat, primarily butcher’s meat. Throughout his work, Delamare consistently places meat as “still one of the most important matters of police.”20 How this plays out in this text reveals not only legal norms that surround these primary food trades, but also the close relationship between maintaining a healthy food supply and performing a public service. Delamare carefully outlines these policing imperatives within the spirit of the law, a spirit bound by the centrality of a healthy and plentiful meat trade for all Parisians.
The police of Paris who were familiar with Delamare’s treatise relied upon an array of regulations to either enable or compel commerce to perform its victualing service. This had to be accomplished under a careful eye to maintain standards of health and hygiene and to avoid fraud and malfeasance.
As much as they possibly could, police took measures against the illegal
sale of meat during Lent, the black market in cattle, and the rogue butchers who peddled illegal meat. Later in the eighteenth century, policing the trade became a bigger issue with the greater scale of the Parisian market and the growing number of private slaughterhouses located throughout the dense, urban landscape. The following chapters detail these primary concerns of the police that centered on the well being of Parisians who depended upon the meat trade for their provisions, or at the very least, who lived in the midst of urban butcheries who confronted this polluting and hazardous trade. The Encyclopédie méthodique, another eighteenth-century text more common in the libraries of Parisian elites, echoed these civic obligations in its “butcher” entry. In this vast compendium of practical knowledge that glorified many of the mechanical arts and promoted Enlightenment ideas of economic liberalization,21 meat appears as a common food that represents a risk for the unsuspecting consumer and therefore demanded the careful eye of inspectors and other officials: Butcher’s meat is the most ordinary of foods after bread, and by consequence,one of those that must be a further and more constant health concern. That is why the police attentively watch over this object and take all the necessary precautions such that the livestock destined for the butchery be healthful, so that those [livestock] be slaughtered and not dead from sickness or suffocation, so that the preparation / dressing of meat be done properly, and that the meat be sold in an expedient time.22
According to this statement, the stakes of heavy regulation rested upon
grave health concerns unique to meat, concerns that touched the vast
majority of the population. In both the Encyclopédie méthodique and Traité de la police, the rationale that structured the social value of meat drew on the assumption that meat was readily available to all in the Parisian markets.
Presupposing its popular status, political elites made meat a central focus
of regulation and subscribed this food to a single, political directive that spoke to subsistence needs. Meat may well have followed bread in this
rhetoric of subsistence, yet to what extent was the crown able to fulfill
these promises given the rest of the country’s limited agricultural resources and grain-dependency? A closer look at the wholesale end of the meat trade (in livestock) reveals the constraints under which the meat supply operated, as well as the limits of the paternalist state that sought to fulfill the public good.

Notes:

1. Sources on the women’s march to Versailles can be found in Laura Mason and Tracey Rizzo, eds., The French Revolution: A Document Collection
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1999), 83–87. The phrase, “la viande de
boucherie est la nourriture la plus ordinaire après le pain,” appears in several eighteenth-century dictionaries including Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences des arts et métiers (Paris: Chez Durand, 1751), 2:350–52; the subsequent Encyclopédie méthodique des arts et métiers méchaniques (Paris: Chez Panckoucke, 1783), 26:229 draws directly from the original Encyclopédie entry, attributed to Jean-Baptiste-René Robinet.
2. For discussions of this earlier period of plentiful meat see Louis Stouff,Ravitaillement et alimentation en Provence aux XIVe et XVe siècles (Paris: Mouton, 1970), 169–94. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie finds a similar case in Languedoc, where in his study of population, monetary, and food crises, he traces moments of extreme dearth and famine in the mid-fourteenth century up until 1470 followed by a period of abundance. See Les Paysans du Languedoc (Paris: S.E.V.P.E.N., 1966), 267. Bernard Chevalier makes the same case for Tours in 1487, “Alimentation et niveau de vie à Tours à la fin du XVe siècle,” Bulletin philologique et historique jusqu’à 1610 du comité . . . (1958), 143–57. Fernand Braudel
speaks of a “carnivorous Europe,” with tables piled high in pyramids of meat, a period that existed until 1580 in some parts of Europe. “Consumption of meat on this scale does not seem to have been a luxury reserved to the very rich in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.” Braudel, The Structure of Everyday Life: The Limits of the Possible, trans. Sian Reynolds (New York: Harper & Row Publishers,1981), 1:190.
3. Historians have pointed to the observations of contemporaries such as
Marshall Vauban, whose 1696 reports on one of the poorest regions of France,the Nivernais, painted a miserable picture of daily life: “The general run of people seldom drink [wine], eat meat not three times a year, and use little salt . . . So it is no cause for surprise if people who are so ill-nourished have so little energy.” Vauban, “Description géographique de l’Election de Verzelay . . .” as cited in Pierre Goubert, The Ancien Regime: French Society, 1600–1750, trans. Steve Cox (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 118. See also Georges Lefebvre, Etudes orléanaises (Paris, 1962), I:218. C. E. Labrousse, Esquisse du mouvement de prix et des
revenus en France au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1933).
4. Ernest Labrousse, Esquisse du mouvement des prix et des revenus en France au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Librairie Dalloz, 1933); Jean Meuvret, Le Problème des subsistances à l’époque Louis XIV: Le Commerce des grains et la conjoncture, 2 vols. (Paris: Mouton, 1988); George Rudé, The Crowd in the French Revolution (London: Oxford University Press, 1959); Richard Cobb, Terreur et subsistances (Paris: Librairie Clavreuil, 1965); and Steven L. Kaplan, Bread, Politics, and Political Economy in the Reign of Louis XV (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976).
5. Jean-Jacques Hémardinquer, “The Family Pig of the Ancien Régime: Myth or Fact?” in Food and Drink in History, vol. 5 of Selections from the Annales: 180 Notes, pp. 1–8 Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations, eds. Orest Ranum and Robert Forster, trans. Patricia M. Ranum (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1979), 50–85.
6. Garnier, “Les marchés aux bestiaux. Paris et sa banlieue,” 597;
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, “Baroques et Lumières,” in vol. 3 of Histoire de la France urbaine (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1981).
7. Royal proclamation, “Portant Reglement sur les Estaux des Boucheries
de Paris,” announced in Paris March 13, 1719, published in 1720. BNF Collection Delamare, ms. fr. 21656, fols. 216–17.
8. ”Toute viande outre le pain et le vin,” translated in Latin as opsonium.
Nicot, Thresor de la langue francoyse (Paris: n.p., 1606), 659.
9. Antoine Furetière, Dictionnaire universel (1690; repr. Paris, n.p., 1972),4:54.
10. Mary Douglas, “Deciphering a Meal,” Daedelus 101 (1972): 61–81.
11. See Madame Campan, Mémoires 3:7, as quoted in Alfred Franklin, “La
Cuisine,” in La Vie privée d’autrefois. Arts et métiers, modes, moeurs, usages des Parisiens du XIIe au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Libraire Plon,1888), 176–79.
12. The earliest evidence of a butcher guild appears in 1146 when Louis VII
(r. 1137–1180) granted “master butchers” the task of providing meat and wine to the city’s lepers. Even at this early date, the crown directed butchers in serving the public good. See Eugène D’Auriac, Essai historique sur la boucherie de Paris (Paris: Librairie de la société des gens de lettres, 1861), 8–10.
13. Steven Laurence Kaplan, “The State and the Problem of Dearth in
Eighteenth-Century France: The Crisis of 1738–41 in Paris,” Food and Foodways 4:2 (1990): 111–41.
14. The police commissaires, who were assigned to specific neighborhoods
in Paris, worked under the lieutenant general of police, one of the king’s highest officers. The lieutenant general’s responsibilities as royal judge and administrator impinged on every aspect of city life since the creation of the post in 1667 including overseeing provisioning. The objectives of his office were carried down to the commissaires and inspectors who worked underneath him at the Châtelet. Alan Williams, The Police of Paris, 1718–1789 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), 7–9.
15. The notion of public good embodies much of the political discourse of
kingship; its use marks the development of the modern state. For further discussion see James Collins, “La guerre de la ligue et le bien public,” in Le Traité de Vervins, eds. Jean-François Labourdette, Jean-Pierre Poussou, and Marie-Catherine Vignal (Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 2000),81–95.
16. Delamare, Traité de la police, 1:2.
17. Delamare, Traité de la police, 1:3.
18. Delamare, Traité de la police, 1:6.
19. Delamare, Traité de la police, 2:600.
20. Delamare, Traité de la police, 2:1129.
21. For an excellent discussion of the Encyclopédie’s view of the butcher as well as other artisans see Cynthia Koepp, “The Alphabetical Order: Work in Notes, pp. 8–12 181 Diderot’s Encyclopédie,” Work in France: Representations, Meaning, Organization, and Practice, ed. Steven L. Kaplan and Cynthia Koepp (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 229–57.
22. Encyclopédie méthodique, 26:229.


ByIn "Meat Matters- Butchers, Politics and Market Culture in Eighteent-Century Paris- University of Rochester Press, Rochester (U.S.A), 2006, pages 7-13)


The homo sapiens mental revolution took place between 100,000 and 40,000 years ago, following the development of grammatical speech. But Homo erectus was pretty smart already judging by evidence that fire had been discovered over 1.6 million years ago. Could fire really have been such an early discovery?

Ever watched a bunch of grown men try to light a campfire? Dancing around a tottering pile of wood with spluttering matches and singed fingers. Huffing and puffing to turn a faint glow into a proper flame. Filling the air with pagan curses and eventually, perhaps, choking clouds of smoke. Humans seem adapted for many things. Our brains and bodies are designed for talking, spear throwing, handling tools and communal living. But lighting fires just ain’t on that list.

New evidence, however, suggests that human exploitation of fire may be quite incredibly ancient, going back some 1.6 million years. Recently developed forensic techniques are strengthening the case that some long-disputed fire remains found in Kenya, East Africa, were indeed kindled by our ancestors. And dramatic new findings show evidence for the presence of fire at other sites including the famous Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania--the missing link in the eyes of many fire researchers. Scientists are now planning to go back to Africa to reopen old excavations in the hope of ending once and for all the controversy about the origins of fire.

Within palaeoanthropological circles, there will be many fingers crossed hoping the latest findings just aren’t true. This is because hominid control of fire at 1.6 million years poses huge problems for current thinking about human evolution. The story goes that technologically sophisticated humans arrived with a "big bang" only about 40 000 years ago, with the development of grammatical speech. If the very early date for the control of fire holds up, then either we have to believe that kindling a roaring blaze is essentially--indeed literally--a pretty dumb skill. Or else we must be willing to upgrade the mental abilities of our forebears rather considerably.

The dating of the origins of fire got off to a false start in the 1940s when the pioneer fossil hunter, Raymond Dart, reported finding blackened animal bones near some 3 million year old hominid remains in a South African cave. Ironically, a lingering Victorian distaste at being descended from the apes meant scientists were happy to push the development of both fire and language as far back into the mists of time as possible. So this ancestor was quickly dubbed Australopithecus prometheus--the giver of fire.

The burning eventually turned out to be just mineral staining. But in the 1970s and 1980s, further tantalising evidence of campfires was uncovered at Koobi Fora and Chesowanja in Kenya. At both sites, archaeologists found the bones and stone tools of Homo erectus--the first hominid species to have a markedly larger brain and fully human-proportioned body. At Koobi Fora, the excavations also uncovered a scattering of ten small, half-metre diameter, "lenses" of baked orange earth dating to around 1.6 million years ago. At Chesowanja, there was just a single lump of baked earth, about 1.4 million years old, that had broken up and washed down a stream bank. Given the close association between bones, tools and burnt patches of ground, the researchers proclaimed here was the true Homo prometheus.

Jack Harris of Rutgers University, New Jersey, who was at Koobi Fora, remembers they only twigged the significance of the discoloured earth when they saw that local tribespeople left exactly the same lens-shaped burnt patches from their overnight campfires. For Harris, the find explained a lot about Homo erectus. Unlike earlier hominid species who appeared to be hugging the cover of Africa’s Great Rift Valley, erectus was using fire to move out into the more open highlands in search of big game.

"At night, a fire would have helped keep the other large carnivores at bay," says Harris. "But it also gets down to zero on the side of the Rift. You’d need a fire so as not to freeze to death at that elevation." He believes that even discounting the many other possible benefits of fire, such as cooking, preserving meat, smoking out game, hardening wooden tools, or driving away biting insects, its control would have been critical to the way erectus managed to break out and start to move around the world. Homo erectus eventually spread through Europe and Asia--good going for a hairless, rather defenceless, warm-adapted, great ape.

While a few of Harris’s fellow researchers were convinced, others said not so fast. The "burnt" patches of soil could be the result of bushfires, lightning strikes, puddled iron deposits or even a weird fungus. There was no corroboration in the form of ash, hearth stones, fire-lighting tools or food remnants. But more than this, controlling fire simply seemed too intellectually sophisticated a feat for this creature. After all, Homo erectus had only just emerged 1.6 million years ago, it was a primitive toolmaker and showed no signs of symbolic thinking over the million years or more of its existence.

Harris’s assertions just didn’t fit with the "big bang" theory of human mental evolution, which paints us as nothing more than smart, bipedal apes for the first 4 million years. While we grew steadily bigger in body and brain, we made meagre advances in lifestyle and tool use. The theory goes that the human race only took off around 40 000 years ago, when one branch of our hominid ancestors developed the capacity for a highly structured form of vocal communication. Overnight we were transformed into modern Homo sapiens--a species driven by language and culture. There was an explosion in our potential for symbolic thought and self-awareness which brought with it a matching explosion in art, tool-making and social complexity.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, such thinking led palaeoanthropologists to downgrade Homo erectus at every turn. Rather than big game hunters, it was felt more likely they were mere carcass scavengers, coming somewhere between hyenas and vultures in the savannah pecking order--that is if they even ate meat rather than just scrounging for nuts and locusts.

Even their characteristic hand axes--the tear-drop shaped flints that were the hallmark of erectus--became a badge of inferiority. Originally, the hand axe had suggested these hominids were thinkers and planners. Rather than picking up the nearest shard of smashed rock, they must have travelled long distances to find the right grade of stone and then patiently crafted it according to some mind’s eye model. But by the 1990s, anthropologists were arguing that the axe shapes might be purely accidental--they were the core, the bit that got chucked away, after a succession of simpler flakes or scrappers had been knocked off round the perimeter. And even if Homo erectus was deliberately manufacturing the hand axes, the same old style was then churned out for the next million years with little further refinement. These hominids were not innovators.

This doubting attitude was also applied to the question of fire. If erectus had managed to master the simple campfire so early, then why was this never taken to the next level? Why not the rapid appearance of hearths, firestrikers and positive signs of cooking. And why such a suspiciously patchy record of fire use? At least hand axes were found at nearly every dig. But burnt earth was found at just a few isolated sites. No, more likely that these erectus guys really were mute dunces and the baked earth the remnant of some long ago bushfire.

There the matter lay until quite recently when a more detailed picture began to emerge and the pendulum of opinion started to swing again.

First off, research showed that the baked earth lenses were indeed the result of fire. Ralph Rowlett of the University of Missouri-Columbia in Missouri, working with colleagues, made a detailed analysis of a cluster of four possible campfires found at a single large excavation at Koobi Fora. Thermoluminescent dating--which relies on the radiation clock of an earth sample being reset by exposure to heat--proved that the discoloured ground was "newer" than surrounding ground, and so not likely to have been produced by mineral staining, fungus or some other non-thermal cause. Rowlett also ruled out lightning strikes by examining the site of genuine strikes and showing that lightning creates not much more than coin-sized pits together with characteristic lumps of fused earth known as fulgerites.

So, campfire or bushfire? Rowlett and others, including Randy Bellomo of the University of South Florida, measured the likely temperature of the fires by looking for signs of crystaline melting in the earth and found they had burned at around 400 ˚C. This compares to bushfires which normally burn at just 100 ˚C or so. Bellomo also used another technique known as archaeomagnetism, which relies on the fact that heating causes iron in the soil to realign with the Earth’s constantly wandering magnetic pole. This showed that the Koobi Fora sediments had a mix of three or four slightly different magnetic orientations, implying the campfires had been relit as erectus revisited a regular haunt over the space of a few years.

Doubters countered that the concentrated heat and repeated burning were probably just the result of bushfires setting light to old tree stumps. So Rowlett went out to a friend’s farm in the Missouri prairie and set light to a few stumps. When he dug out the remains, the earth was burnt in a cone spreading into the ground with the roots rather than in the shallow lens-shape found under a campfire.

Rowlett then carried out a phytolith analysis of the soil at Koobi Fora. Phytoliths are microscopic silica deposits found in the stems and tissues of plants. Being almost indestructible, they survive long after the ash and other remains of a fire have leached away. Furthermore, over the past decade archaeologists have learnt to recognise exactly what kind of plant material was burnt from the shape of individual phytoliths.

Rowlett reported that the phytoliths from three of the Koobi Fora campfires turned out to be from a mix of grasses and woods, with palm tree dominating. Even today palm wood is preferred in Africa for being quick to kindle and bright of flame. These looked like fires of collected wood. Still more tellingly, when Rowlett checked a fourth, rather irregular patch of burnt earth that lay away from the other three fires, it turned up just a single species of phytolith as if this was indeed an old tree stump caught in a bushfire. Patient analysis was strengthening the case for fire at Koobi Fora. Even so, Rowlett says he surprised a few people when he summarised his findings at a conference held in China last October.

Then in April a bombshell was dropped. At the Paleoanthropology Society annual meeting in Philadelphia, Brian Ludwig, from Rutgers University revealed evidence that fire use by erectus was widespread. Ludwig, a student of Harris, had carried out an exhaustive analysis of flint artifacts and the debris of tool-making, personally inspecting some 40 000 pieces collected from over 50 sites in Africa and covering the period from 2.5 million to less than 1 million years ago. His aim was to see whether flint knapping skills really did remain static over this period. "I wasn’t even looking for signs of fire," says Ludwig. But he found them anyway.

"When stones like basalt or quartz are exposed to intense heat, like being left around near a campfire, they change colour and also get these potlid fractures--little dimples--on the surface," says Ludwig. He found these signs of thermal alteration all over the place, and there was a clear pattern. No potlid fractures on any of the stone tools until around 1.6 million years ago. Then after that, they occur consistently across many sites, including the post-1.6 million year old strata at Olduvai on the shores of Lake Turkana where, despite remarkable preservation of other artifacts, fire had never been reported before. While not as direct evidence as burnt earth, the burnt tools considerably broaden the claim for early fire.

It’s hardly surprising that these findings have met with some opposition. Henry Bunn of the University of Wisconsin-Madison says the control of fire is such a crucial development that it is going to require much stronger evidence to convince everyone in the field. And Ofer Bar-Yosef of Harvard’s Peabody Museum, is also sceptical. He only recently helped score a goal for the anti-fire camp by showing that the famous layers of ash in the caves of "Peking Man"--the 1920s finding of 500 000 year old Homo erectus skeletons in Zhoukoudian near Beijing--are probably not ash at all but sediment. The rock hollow "hearths" look more like water carved features and charred animal bones may have been washed into the caves.

But even the cautious minded Bunn and Bar-Yosef believe there is good evidence that Homo erectus did use fire later on. From about 400 000 years ago proper hearths--rings of stones--burnt bones, and other clear evidence of fire become common throughout Europe. New finds are made nearly every year with recent discoveries, soon to be described in more detail, including Beeches Pit in Suffolk, Britain, and SchØ ningen in Germany.

Bar-Yosef says the 400 000 year old SchØ ningen site is particularly significant because beautifully carved wooden spears and butchered horse remains were also found there. The wooden spears have been a huge shock to researchers, forcing them to accept that late Homo erectus was a skilled hunter and skilled tool maker. "People had been trying to split erectus and even the Neanderthals off from every kind of cultural activity, saying they couldn’t really have done this or that until 40 000 years ago. But that’s rubbish," says Bar-Yosef. "Erectus would have needed fire just to be in Europe during the ice ages. And even the latest dates that people accept--around 250 000 years ago--would be a problem for the idea that everything important starts to happen with Homo sapiens."

But Clive Gamble of the University of Southampton, argues that what count is not what our ancestors did, but how they did it. And language made an explosive difference. Gamble says erectus had a "15-minute culture". Essentially, they made tools for immediate use and then discarded them. It was a case of mechanically producing something very practical, rather than living within a culture with language in which every activity becomes invested with elaborate rituals and beliefs. No elaboration means no pressure to experiment and no new tool traditions to pass from one generation to the next. The result was technological stasis.

Gamble says that if erectus had used fire, it would have followed the same pattern. Campfires would have been lit as necessary for warmth or protection, eventually even for cooking. But they would not have had the symbolic significance they have in Homo sapiens culture where the first act of any gathering of hunter-gatherers is to light a campfire, then sit around it eating, talking, singing, remembering. Language was needed to transform the daily activities of early hominids from the dully practical into something where every slightest act became socially expressive and personally meaningful.

As to whether this pragmatic version of erectus could have managed the trick of fire, Gamble says it might be less of a stretch than people think. Erectus was already an energetic banger of rocks so could easily have discovered how to make sparks fly. And the Schoningen wooden spears now hint that erectus may have managed the more efficient method of a wood drill.

So the "big bang" theory of human mental evolution could be stretched to accommodate a somewhat more capable version of Homo erectus while also retaining the idea that language had a transforming effect on first the culture and then the technology of Homo sapiens. Even a very early control of fire could be conceded without giving the whole game away.

There are still plenty of holes in the story, though. If Homo erectus was a fire lighter, then why are there no obvious fire striking stones in the archaeological record until about 100 000 years ago? And if humans have been using fire for 1.6 million years, then surely we ought to have hands as tough as oven gloves or a fire-nurturing instinct wired into our brains? There has been plenty of time for more obvious signs of genetic adaptation. And when exactly did cooking start? From the first, Homo erectus had significantly smaller teeth and jaws--thought to be a result of their switch from a diet of tough plant material to more meat. But it was not until modern Homo sapiens that there was a second dramatic drop in tooth size, as if these people had started eating more chewable food.

So the controversies will continue. But Harris says at least the recent spate of fresh evidence has shocked a few people into realising how much the mental implications of fire were being ignored. "This has got people thinking again," he says.

In: http://www.btinternet.com/. Version of article in New Scientist by John McCrone, May 2000. Edited and adapted to be posted by Leopoldo Costa