LAST year, it was Frozen. This year, it might be Eight Below. A holiday during the long, cold Michigan winter is a chance for my family to spend some quality time together. And what better way to enjoy our evenings than by watching movies on TV?
Some might call this a waste of time. Anthropologist Christopher Lynn begs to differ. He believes there is a good reason why many of us like gathering around the idiot box. Far from being frivolous, it is a legacy of a behaviour that arose to help humans survive the unforgiving Stone Age world.
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It is tempting to see human evolution through the prism of technological breakthroughs that brought tangible material benefits. When our ancestors learned to make projectile weapons, for instance, they could hunt more effectively and secure more reliable sources of meat. Softer aspects of life, such as the ways we socialise, might seem less important to the success of our species. But Lynn, who is based at the University of Alabama, says we socialise not because we like to, but because we need to.
That may seem obvious to anyone who has struggled with isolation during lockdown this year. But Lynn goes further still. He thinks that the pleasure we gain from relaxing around the TV with friends and family might help explain why humanity became so social in the first place. It all began, he says, when our ancestors learned to control fire.
We have known for decades that the use of fire transformed life for early humans. It allowed them to cook food, for example, making it easier to digest. But there is another crucial side to fire: its role as a source of light around which people can gather as dusk turns into full-blown night. One of the few researchers to consider the social importance of firelight is anthropologist Polly Wiessner at the University of Utah. For decades, she has been visiting the Ju/’hoansi, hunter-gatherers who live in southern Africa, to study their way of life. A decade ago, she decided to explore the content of more than 150 Ju/’hoansi conversations she had documented – and she made a remarkable discovery.
During the day, the talk was relatively mundane or practical; about one-third of discussions concerned practical topics such as hunting strategies and technology, for instance, with another third devoted to complaints about group members. Around the campfire at night, however, around 80 per cent of conversations were . Some were funny, others exciting – all were entertaining. Yet they often also contained information about social etiquette and tradition, as well as about geographically distant social contacts who could be visited for help during times of hardship. In other words, listening to these stories had the potential to make life and survival easier. “In the big picture, stories are probably more important than day talk,” says Wiessner.
But there is another way fire might have bound us together as a social species. The archaeological record suggests that campfires appeared perhaps 1.5 million years ago, but there is little evidence that for at least another million years. If so, then fire was, for much of human prehistory, a resource that had to be gathered from the environment. That can be difficult, says Lynn, so would have encouraged people to cooperate with one another to keep their campfires burning day and night.
He believes that is a big reason why groups containing the most affable and cooperative humans thrived over time. Throw in the idea that these groups took further advantage of fireside cordiality by telling information-laden stories to one another at night, and you arrive at a scenario in which we were evolutionarily selected to find fire comforting rather than frightening, as other animals do, and to enjoy the prospect of cooperating, socialising and storytelling around the flames.
A just-so story, you might think, but Lynn and his team have investigated this further. First, while having their blood pressure measured. The readings dropped significantly, which is a sign of relaxation, whereas there was no such effect in people who watched a static, upside-down image of the fire. What’s more, the largest relaxation effect occurred in the people who were most gregarious, as assessed by a personality questionnaire. So there seems to be a link between fire, relaxation and socialising. “It reinforces the importance of [Wiessner’s] findings,” says Nathaniel Dominy at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.
Flickering screens
This got Lynn thinking about the 21st-century implications of our ancient love of stories by firelight. Could it help explain why many of us enjoy gathering around a bright TV screen at night to watch a show with friends? To test this idea, his team recently carried out another experiment. This time, instead of seeing a video of flickering flames, . It wasn’t an exciting blockbuster, just a dry, anthropological careers advice video. Nevertheless, it, too, reduced people’s blood pressure – and, again, the effect was most pronounced in the most gregarious viewers.
Others are intrigued by these findings. “I think there is much to be explored here,” says Wiessner. Dominy wonders whether there is something in the nature of flickering firelight itself that stimulates group socialising and storytelling. In 2019, Tetsuhiko Kashima at the University of Tokyo and his colleagues built on Lynn’s work by while they watched a real fire. “They saw this amplification of delta waves, which are brainwaves strongly associated with memory and attentiveness,” says Dominy. This might suggest that flickering firelight helps tune the brain so that it is receptive to learning lessons from stories. Dominy hopes to explore further by examining whether the brain activity of groups gazing into a campfire becomes synchronised, boosting the sense of cohesion.
Another interesting phenomenon may occur when we stare at flickering flames. Lynn suspects that their rapid movement and unpredictable flares might generate a “what is it?” reaction that physiologists call an orienting response. Some research suggests that . In both cases, says Lynn, as soon as we remember there is no cause for alarm, we might experience a pleasurable endorphin release. If so, that could help explain why staring at a fire or a TV is deeply comforting.
“Can our ancient love of stories by firelight explain the TV’s allure?”
There is still work to be done, not least to discover whether different types of shows have different physiological effects. Like watching TV, some might call this research a waste of time. Yet Lynn is fascinated by the high value we put on socialising. “It’s one of the mysteries we need to focus in on if we really want to understand the evolution of our species.”
