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 on
Screens of the Stone Age · Josh Lindal, Dr. Kimberly Plomp, and Dr. Ross Barnett
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Show Notes
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: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmVuNlu0LCk
The earliest controlled use of fire: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2743299
The oldest stone tools: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-32804177
Neanderthals hafted tools with birch tar: https://www.science.org/content/article/50000-year-old-tar-smeared-tool-shows-neanderthal-smarts
The oldest cave paintings: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aap7778
Divje Babe Neanderthal “flute”: https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/holes-in-a-bone-flute-or-fluke
Palaeolithic Lithophones: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0092.1985.tb00229.x
Homo naledi: https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/homo-naledi-your-most-recently-discovered-human-relative.html
Early art at Blombos Cave: https://theconversation.com/south-africas-blombos-cave-is-home-to-the-earliest-drawing-by-a-human-103017
Goog Enough on Twitter: https://x.com/goog_enough
Sima de los Huesos: https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/the-sima-hominins-an-ancient-human-cold-case
The Mauer mandible: https://efossils.org/page/boneviewer/homo%20heidelbergensis/Mauer%201
Bae et al. (2023) Moving away from “the Muddle in the Middle” toward solving the Chibanian puzzle: https://doi.org/10.1002/evan.22011
Roksandic et al. (2021) Resolving the “muddle in the middle”: The case for Homo bodoensis sp. nov. https://doi.org/10.1002/evan.21929
The Middle Pleistocene was renamed to “Chibanian”: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/chibanian-age-earths-newly-named-geological-period-180974224/