Why Do Humans Love Watching Fire?

It’s a pleasure that’s as near universal among humans as it comes. Among the vast spectrum of cultures, you’ll find very few individuals who don’t get a fuzzy feeling when gathered around a campfire in good company. 

At a glance, our love of flames seems obvious: fire = warmth and, hopefully, food. However, if you dig deeper, you’ll discover that this connection goes far beyond simply satisfying our basic animal instincts.

Fire, I’ll take you to learn

Christopher D. Lynn is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Alabama who has looked very closely at the biocultural relationship between humans and campfires. In 2014, he led a study that investigated whether camp and hearth fires help to relax people on a physiological level. It might sound like an obvious question, but the research was one of the first attempts to scientifically investigate it. 

“I did that study basically as a way to put empirical data down and have something that people can cite when they go around saying that fires are relaxing,” Lynn told IFLScience.

“I always joke that my expertise is providing empirical data to support things that are already widely known and accepted,” he added.

The results were just as you’d expect: people who viewed a pleasant campfire, accompanied by its natural sounds, experienced significant decreases in blood pressure, indicating they were chilled out by its presence.

Some subtler points were also unearthed by the experiment. The fire’s relaxing effect was significantly reduced when the participants watched a visual of the flames without sound, suggesting that noise is an important part of the fire’s immersive qualities. 

Interestingly, the participants who scored higher for personality traits like prosociality – the tendency toward cooperative and social behavior – tended to experience even greater relaxation responses to the fire stimulus. For Lynn, this emphasized his suspicion that our infatuation with flames has a deeply social element. 

C’mon, baby, light my fire

Some researchers propose that Homo erectus – the long-lived, extinct relative of Homo sapiens – was controlling fire as early as 1 million years ago, as evidenced by microscopic traces of wood ash found at the Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa. More conservative assessments place this closer to 700,000 years ago. Recent research places the earliest evidence for actually making fire around 400,000 years ago. Either way, this is long before our species – Homo sapiens – evolved around 200,000 to 300,000 years ago. 

If you're going to control [fire], it would assume there's some sort of communication going on. It's a pretty sophisticated technology that no one person alone could manage.

Prof. Christopher D. Lynn

This time frame within the past 1 million years was a vitally important chapter in the evolution of the human genus. Between 800,000 to 200,000 years ago, hominin brains expanded rapidly, allowing for more complex behavior. Some scientists speculate that it’s no coincidence this period of evolution was also when we began to tame flames. 

“If you're going to control [fire], it would assume there's some sort of communication going on. It assumes that language is developing and the kind of prefrontal cortical development that would facilitate a level of executive control, [as well as] short and long-term memory,” Lynn contends.

“It's a pretty sophisticated technology that no one person alone could manage,” he notes.

While our bigger brains afforded us the ability to domesticate fire, the flames helped to open more parts of our potential. Fire allowed early humans to cook food, which made it easier to chew and digest, unlocking more calories and nutrients to fuel our burgeoning brains. Simultaneously, fire unlocked more hours in the day, creating more time to socialize and exchange ideas. 

“We're trying to understand if [fire] influences pro-sociality, bringing people together, calming them down in a context where they can exchange ideas,” Lynn explained.

“If you're sitting around an evening fire and it's dark everywhere else, it's really hard to sort of sneak off and do your own thing. It's not like they have an iPhone to play with, right? They are more likely to sit in the common area that's lit and continue whatever daytime activities, whether that's flint knapping, making a pot, whatever it is,” he continued.

“It’s extending the day at a time when people's circadian rhythms are also calming down.”     

In this vein of thought, fire could be seen as a catalyst that made us into truly social beings. The act of sitting around a campfire relaxed us, making it easier to forge deeper relationships and “expand” our minds. 

Some researchers have dived even further into this idea of campfires promoting complex social behavior. Sociologist James McClenon has argued that Homo erectus may have fallen into altered states of consciousness through the hypnotic influence of watching campfires. Perhaps, he claims, this could have been the origins of shamanism, spirituality, and religion – powerful forces that have made human networks immensely more engaged and connected.

Lynn thinks this hypothesis is enticing, although he believes it’s likely only part of the story.

“I’m not a total skeptic… I think it's part of a mosaic of behaviors. It's not just religion that's developing. It's social life, it's language, it's cooperation. I find it to be a cool story to get people interested, but I think there's more to it,” he told IFLScience.

Let me stand next to your fire

In the modern era, not many humans can say they finish their day while surrounded by a small cohort of trusted loved ones, ogling a comfortable display of flames. However, it could be argued that technology has created another way to achieve a comparable effect: television. 

I’ve started thinking about fire as analogous to television. The flickering lights, the sound. It’s the levels of immersion. Since our visual sense is our primary sense, it's the easiest one to grab a hold of.

Prof. Christopher D. Lynn

TV is often derided as an anti-social, unhealthy pastime that rots our brains and turns us into cultureless couch potatoes. To be sure, watching sitcom reruns for eight hours a day isn’t likely to boost your well-being. However, maybe we’ve been too unfair to the pro-social properties of television. Just like huddling around a campfire, a television-watching session involves storytelling, engaging visuals, and time unwinding with loved ones.

“I’ve started thinking about fire as analogous to television. The sort of flickering lights, the sound. It's not necessarily fire itself, but it's the levels of immersion. Since our visual sense is our primary sense, it's the easiest one to grab a hold of,” Lynn ponders.

In more recent times, even the once-sacred institution of TV isn’t safe. The collective ritual of watching televised shows with your close confidants is dying amid the unstoppable rise of social media and hyper-personalized streaming services. 

Social media gives us the surface-level impression of community and sociality; our brains are clearly deceived by this facade, administering a dose of serotonin every time we gaze into the smartphone’s glow. However, it never truly quenches our appetite for interaction, nor does it have the relaxing aesthetic of a fire. Far from satisfying our social urges, recent studies have strongly hinted that social media can often leave us feeling lonely and disengaged from the world. 

If watching a movie on a sofa with your friends or family is a modern parallel of the ancient campfire, perhaps doomscrolling through your smartphone is the psychological and spiritual equivalent of staring at a plastic lighter, alone.

This feature first appeared in Issue 30 of our digital magazine CURIOUS. Older issues of CURIOUS are free for all users. To access new issues, become an All Access Member.