Swinging a fist at nature

Chimpanzees are the species closest to us in nature, but if we look at their hands, it's not hard to see the difference between the two. Chimpanzees have longer palms, which allow them to grip their four fingers like hooks, a trait they have been selected for by living in tropical rainforests for years, where an inch between fingertip and branch can mean the difference between life and death as they dart from branch to branch. However, this elongated palm also brings a problem, that is, the chimpanzee's hand is difficult to clench into a compact fist like the human hand, because their thumb and other four fingers are relatively farther apart. Therefore, chimpanzees rely more on sharp teeth, palm strikes and tearing than fists when fighting.

　　Humans are different. Compared to chimpanzees, our palms are shorter, our thumbs can tighten around our index and middle fingers, and our ring and pinky fingers curl up again, making our palms muscularly bound into a compact fist. When such a fist is painfully struck on the opponent's body, the force is concentrated at the peak of the fist, and a smaller contact area means more pressure and force. The reason we have such a hand structure is the result of many factors (such as holding tools, etc.) resonating, but in which the screening of violence may also play a role. In evolutionary history, those individuals with long palms were unable to clench their fists (and of course they did not have chimpanzees with sharp teeth), so they were at a disadvantage in combat, and being suppressed by violence in a resource-poor environment meant losing the opportunity to continue the bloodline and genes.

　　It is ironic that we thought that what makes us different is that we can create with our hands, but the data from the lab shows that our hands are equally useful for destroying each other.

　　Scarcity brings violence, and our proud hands have a structure better suited to unleashing violence, proving once again that it is scarcity that shapes us. If humans want to continue to fight, they must do so not by throwing their fists at each other, but by throwing their fists at nature.

　　The fire is the human fist.

　　Let's imagine this scenario: one evening, about 500,000 years ago, in the suburbs of Beijing, dark clouds were low, the wind was rising in the wilderness, and a sudden change in air pressure heralded the arrival of a rainstorm, and several Peking apes were walking toward the cave of Dragonbone Mountain, where they would most likely fall ill if they were drenched by the rain, which in the Paleolithic era often meant becoming a dead bone or the dung of a wild animal. As they were about to walk into the cave, the whole sky suddenly lit up, followed by a loud thunder, and a dead tree on a distant hillside turned into a bright mass under the lightning strike.

　　One of the Peking apes looked at his companions walking into the cave, and then turned his head to look at the light on the hillside. The light in the distance jumped and flashed in his pupils, and he made up his mind to go and see what was happening there, so he let out a whirring sound from his mouth and ran with his legs to the distant hillside.

　　It was raining, and the drops of water falling along the entrance of the cave gradually joined into a line, and the world outside the cave became hazy in the sound of the rain. Just as the few Peking apes in the cave were huddled together because of the cold, a faint orange light appeared not far from the entrance of the cave. Gradually, the light grew brighter and clearer, followed by a drenched companion flashing in from the rain and mist, holding a wooden stick in his hand, and at the tip of the stick, a beam of light jumped.

　　That was fire.

　　There is archaeological evidence that the Beijing apes had mastered the ability to control fire during the Paleolithic period in which they lived. It is likely that they collected natural fire from nature and then took care to ensure that the fire would not go out. The burnt earth layer of about 6 meters in the Zhoukoudian cave is evidence of this.

　　Fire is extremely important to humans, and since the beginning of mastering the use of fire, humans have been able to release chemical energy in matter in extreme ways, which has led to unprecedented breakthroughs in diet and activity areas.

　　For example, diet. Humans, as a large primate, are actually not suitable for excessive consumption of raw meat. Because raw meat mainly consists of protein, protein into the human digestive tract will be broken down by some proteases into peptide chains and amino acids, and finally absorbed by the body in the small intestine. However, different proteases need to find the amino acid sequence they can recognize when breaking down proteins in order to open the chain, just like handcuffs are linked together to form a long chain, and a specific protease is a specific key, and the chain can only be cut by unlocking one of the handcuffs in the chain that corresponds to the key. This is not an easy task, as the pressure on proteases increases when a large amount of protein enters the digestive tract, and they miss some proteins when they are overwhelmed. At this point, the microorganisms in the gut come to the rescue. They break down the protein in their own way into ammonia toxins, which enter the bloodstream and cause a spike in blood ammonia levels, which then spread to the brain, causing dizziness, nausea, vomiting, and even death.

　　How do you alleviate this problem? Just let the protein break down to some degree before it enters the body. For example, heating with fire, so that the pressure on the protease is much less, the probability of protein poisoning is also reduced, and after humans use fire, heating food gradually formed a habit, which makes the pressure on the digestive tract is greatly reduced, the human intestine is further shortened, "infrastructure" to save nutrition and energy Once again into the "spiritual and cultural construction", the brain will have the possibility of further enlargement.

　　In fact, the flame brings benefits far beyond this, heating food can effectively destroy the microorganisms and parasites, after all, the level of hygiene of raw food and cooked food is incomparable, which greatly reduces the probability of human infection.

　　Parasites can be a great drain on human energy and nutrition, which in the Paleolithic era, when food was already scarce, was certainly worse for people. The use of fire alleviated this problem, and high temperatures could largely destroy parasites and harmful microorganisms, greatly improving the living environment of ancient humans. Thus, scarcity shaped not only the flesh of Homo erectus, but also their behavior.

　　Of course, fire also became a powerful weapon in the hands of Homo erectus. A lone Pekinese ape who suddenly encounters a large predator in the wild is likely to become the dung of this large beast: but if he holds a large, burning branch in his hand, the situation may be quite different. The orange glowing flame leaps demonically at the tip of the branch in the hands of the upright man, and a little closer, the skin of the mastodon will produce unbearable burning pain, while the flame may also take the opportunity to crawl up the fur of the mastodon, making them painful. It can be said that the use of flame, so that the contrast in power between humans and large beasts gradually reversed, in the following hundreds of thousands of years, more and more animals in nature learned to respect this mysterious power mastered by humans.