Commentary

Anthropology’s Christmas gift

January 3, 2026   ·   0 Comments

By Constance Scrafield

Anthropology has delivered a brave new discovery at pretty well the right time of year to be a gift. You may have already heard about it if you follow the work of the explorers of our past, going back six million years. That is the very beginning, so we are told, of those creatures rising from the most fertile earth in the world, in Africa. Creatures deemed to be our far-off ancestors – too far back to be called uncles, still too early to be painting the other creatures of their environment on cave walls.

Those explorers, as I like to call them, are digging and brushing their finds with toothbrushes, like the brave souls, working for decades to clean and restore great works of art in much more recent times, but still long ago to us.

Yet, those heroes, as I call them as well, working at sites of evidence, even all the way back, with strings of explorers coming forward in their turns, encapsulating the anthropology of humans in their collective evolution as a single being.

They might create the image of us as one entity, to meld every shred of humanity into a single equation.

All this and I haven’t yet told you about the gift Anthropology, that Grand Old Soul, keeper of our own intimate cells and sins, we are still moving grains of dust around, poking into tiny crevices within the walls of each settlement and stage, sometimes for a big “Hello!” other times there is only more dust.

Yet, as it often is, our explorers were somehow called to Barnham, a village in County Suffolk, England.

Here, a basic arrangement of rooms and tools delivered a truly stunning discovery, a click in the progress of the being that is us.

A chiselled flint and pyrite stone where no pyrite should be, but striking them together equalled the first intentional fire making. In this humble spot with a cosy room in which the nascent humans gathered and sat before a controlled fire, purposely set for the sake of comfort …four hundred thousand years ago: looks like this: 400,000 years ago.

That is how they write it up in their notes.

So, not a mighty tower crammed with tools, domestic and otherwise; not a hoard of precious jewels and gold.

This is something, at once so simple, while it changed everything. As the journalist for the BBC, my source for this story and the first to report it, the history-changing discovery of how to create warmth and leading to their learning and desiring to cook meat meant that our brains grew, and we were now not struggling to survive. Now there was time and energy to think and invent.

A pivotal time in our evolution, pushing the time of human fire-making back some 350,000 years earlier than was originally thought.

And so, purposeful fire-making pushed us along, made us smarter, faster, and it still took us thousands of years to make wine – not until 7,000 years ago in China, but apparently news travelled fast and by that time, we were wrapping ourselves in linen that we wove and living in those towers, adorning ourselves in jewellery and gems. As the BBC told it, the discovery of having fire in the hearth was the time when the “pieces started coming together.”

Simple technology, they called it, but utterly transformative for humanity’s future course.

When our cooked-meat-fed brains began to grow and learn… well, there was a long way to go, to be sure, before we were angling to colonize Mars, and this was still our prehistory.

Surely, there are lessons to be learned from the general pattern of formative discoveries throughout the millennia of our passing generations. If we had it all to do again, would we be here?

There is no denying that we are a tough crowd as a species, with many ponderous failings, which our very mighty ingenuity and ability to invent, like crazy! – is ever looking for more.

But wait – at our base, we are at one with this planet, and our connection to it is our drive, inclination (not quite the same) and ability to create beauty, as we are learning, so does all of nature.

Recently, I have been writing so much about the value of and being deeply involved with art, more than that, culture, which is the heart and soul of all communities, from small villages to the whole world.

Like everything, “culture” can be dark, can be dangerous. That can only be defeated by determined positivity.

Time to pause for reflection and maybe a glass of that wine that was so long in the making, relatively speaking. Taking a pause for a rest, given the coming tide of the New Year’s season resolutions, might be exactly what is needed. From this writer about the arts, I wish you a time of joy.

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