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By word of mouth, by showing their children how it's done; the science is the easy part to pass on. Even an irrational human can understand what to do, if not why.
The myth is not science.
There are the distortions in word of mouth. Sometimes, a group dies out and its oral tradition is lost. But there is also this: Place the stones in a circle of twelve to contain the fire spirit. Gather the proper leaves and wood that will satisfy the needs of the fire spirit. Rub the sticks together to invoke the fire spirit. Feel the heat as the fire spirit comes into this world. See the fire spirit manifest and consume the offering of proper leaves and wood.
That is not precise, of course, compared to whatever story someone told. But, still, it is akin to what would manifest.
Why twelve stones? Because that is what worked the first time. Or maybe an affinity emerges when the real principle is to complete the circle. But why complete the circle? To contain the fire.
Why the proper leaves? At first it was a coincidence of whatever burned.
Fire spirit? It's not just the heat in the sticks. In our modern era, it's not just a line from a movie that fire can look like a living creature; it breathes, eats, excretes, reproduces, and even responds to stimuli in predictable ways. And while you and I know it's not alive—well, okay, so, there was this weird moment a couple years ago, when California was suffering flaming tornadoes, and a meteorologist in my corner of the world set people to headscratching when he pointed out that California used to be on fire a lot, back before American settlement. And, really, it was an,
Okay, and? moment, as such; y'know, timing is everything. But I think of it now because, sure, we can only imagine the stories the Wukchumni of 3000 years ago could tell about when the sky did that loud flashing thing and delivered fire into the forest, and, sure, they didn't necessarily have flaming EF3s chasing them around, but there used to be a lot more trees in the San Joaquin Valley. Some years were probably more spectacular than others.
Start with "at what point in history", did our use of fire correspond to a science?
And now you're very close.
These posts take a while to write, sometimes. I didn't mean to leave you hanging. Trust, me, I was fascinated, staring at a map, last night, realizing that the Dogon, driven off the Niger River at Mandé, stayed back away from the river when they moved eastward into Burkina Faso, a point they repeated when they later fled northward to Bandiagara. There is some subtlety in their decisions.
So, it's not quite—
Since, you know, it took until universities and labs were built for humans to really understand the science of combustion. Well, sure, but don't make the mistake of comparing the modern version of science with what knowledge we had then, what the theories were (irrational myths! we thought fire was a living thing and we worshipped it).
—that difference, but, still, I would point out that even three thousand years after writing arrived, the great philosophers of Greek time managed to figure out that something fell to the ground or rose into the air because it had falling or rising properties. Say what we will about four humors, it took until Cardinal Cusanas in the fifteenth century to figure the importance of measuring cardiac pulse against time; universal gravitation apparently required a seventeenth century Rosicrucian queer.
In the Americas, some people managed spectacular architecture without a proper writing system. But when it comes to teaching children how to use fire, or build a longhouse, or ventilate a kiva, yes, even an irrational human can understand what to do, if not why. The why is the science.
But how do people explain the science? That's what I mean about being out of sequence: The vocabulary they would use would reflect their more superstitious view of the world around them. To wit:
Why invent a mythical explanation, when the ordinary one is perfectly acceptable?
What explanation is that?
The thing about
fascination is that I can very nearly see it, according to a basic definition, by the time we get to polished floors at Göbekli Tepe—okay, why are they polished? The architectural innovation of the T-pillar megaliths is impressive, but in explaining their construction to one another as they went, what explanation was it? We're talking seven to nine thousand years before the philosophy of falling properties. The pillars, which appear at Nevalı Çori and other fertile crescent sites, might be the oldest known megaliths, and are now viewed as human representations. Nonetheless, some of the artwork, ca. 11 kya, is subtle. Moreover, given the likely trends described at similar sites, and the prospect of a complex cult center among hunter-gatherers, the explanations were likely animistic.
All these eventual scientific uses of fire, in cooking, after-hours lighting, in weapon-making, pottery and early forms of jewelry, were learned by humans who played around with fire, inquisitively and presumably, with some degree of fascination.
Fascination, as such, seems a later result.
Still, when we circle back 'round to your question, "
Why invent a mythical explanation, when the ordinary one is perfectly acceptable?" it really is hard to figure what you expect that ordinary, perfectly acceptable explanation was.
Why didn't early humans who knew how to use fire, go to the trouble of questioning a myth about the reason they can make it?
Would you prefer a socioeconomic discussion of slavery? Writing systems? By the time we get to ancient Greece, maybe? Were we up to the four elements, then? Oh. Five. Aristotle and aether.
But especially among oral traditions, which are more fixed in their recorded forms than they ever were as spoken, what questions do you expect they should have asked?
Why not ask about what humans did before fire was stolen?
And if a given myth considers that? What are you looking for? Were they cold? Yes. Did the food suck? Yes. Was it dark? Well, when Raven opened the box with the sun inside, that was apparently something different. But that's also a different myth. Still, the point is that some myths do consider such things.
Well, here we suppose they didn't go, or they invented another myth that starts when humans get fire, before this humans don't live in this world but another one, where they don't have fire. I guess.
So, yes. What, realistically, did you expect?
Still, if we wind back in this thread, we might observe (
#325↑) you noting, "Most religions include fire and creation mythologies." And while cave paintings as veneration is not an unreasonable discussion, so, sure, before humans had fire, they likely had to come from somewhere. Toward that, though, consider your own note, "Eventually world-creation myths started to show up", suggesting a significant development in philosophical thought. The underlying question represents its own sort of progress in human thought and social experience.
Throughout, you're hitting various marks, as with your conjecture:
So we tamed fire, H erectus did this about 1 million ya. Then later the mythology arose that fire was stolen from the gods, this one persisted. My conjecture is that a myth persists because a society needs it to, and when it doesn't it discards or replaces the myth with another one.
But in
#330↑, you propose, "So now all that we need is an explanation as to why a fire-stealing myth replaces the (more rational) history of fire use by ancestral humans", and there is a vantage from which the first response is to wonder, "What do you mean? Why do you need that explanation?" The problem with that response, of course, is that it doesn't define the problem. What seems so awry about your proposition has to do with these questions of sequence and contiguity. How much of what information is supposed to be passed on through oral tradition, over what period? The vocabulary that is not animistic and suffused in mystery comes later, but the communicated knowledge must stabilize in order for that to happen.
The explanation you require is that the myth did not "replace" a more rational telling of history, but, rather,
is the history told. The more rational history is conceived later.
And in that context, there is a perspective by which it occurs to note, comparatively, the modern context of actual replacement of history with mythopoeia. That is in many ways a larger political question, though, and history will someday tell, in its way, what is actually happening now. Some are forgetting their own lives and lifetimes in order to justify the history they assert. And while it is difficult to project what we will be able to see from the perspective of our own living futures, retrospection from beyond our time will find the oral history a catastrophe, and the primary source record its own sort of archaeological challenge, seeking useful data in layers upon layers of noise. What will emerge will be a testament to fascination with self, and we can only wonder what story will people tell when humans finally achieve some manner of decent mastery of themselves. Actually, we have a hint, but that can be another discussion.
