Episode 81: Firebringer (2016)

Firebringer (2016) is a musical play about the discovery of fire by a tribe of polyamourous, matriarchal ancient humans. They also invent stone tools, art, hunting—they pretty much hit all the classic caveman tropes, and even subvert some of them. The only problem is... it’s a musical.

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In this episode:

• Watch Firebringer (2016) on YouTube

• The earliest controlled use of fire

• The oldest stone tools

• Neanderthals hafted tools with birch tar

• The oldest cave paintings

• Divje Babe Neanderthal “flute”

• Palaeolithic Lithophones

• Homo naledi

• Early art at Blombos Cave

• Goog Enough on Twitter

• Sima de los Huesos

• The Mauer mandible

• Bae et al. (2023) Moving away from “the Muddle in the Middle” toward solving the Chibanian puzzle

• Roksandic et al. (2021) Resolving the “muddle in the middle”: The case for Homo bodoensis sp. nov.

• The Middle Pleistocene was renamed to “Chibanian”