Did the Evolution of Language Take a Huge Leap Around the Fireplace?

A new theory links storytelling, firelight and the rise of spoken language.

The campfire may have done more than keep our ancestors warm. It may have helped turn ape-like communication into language.

For hundreds of thousands of years, fire stretched the human day beyond sunset, gathering people into a flickering circle when hunting, gathering and other practical work had stopped. A new theory argues that this unusual social setting (no other creature could control fire) may have created the conditions for something radically different to emerge: sustained storytelling.

The researchers argue that the cozy setting transformed the way our ancestors communicated — from gestures tied closely to the here and now into the flexible spoken language humans use today.

Why did we need it?

Catherine Hobaiter, a primatologist at the University of St Andrews, and Nathaniel J. Dominy, an anthropologist at Dartmouth College were inspired to embark on this study after trying to answer a pretty awkward-sounding question: what did early humans actually need language for?

Other great apes already manage many jobs once invoked to explain language. They coordinate activities, learn tool traditions, form alliances and communicate intentionally. Chimpanzees and gorillas possess large gestural repertoires, and a 2024 Current Biology study found that chimpanzee gestural exchanges show rapid turn-taking with timing similar to human conversation.

“It starts to look like human language didn’t evolve for anything very useful!” Hobaiter said in a University of St Andrews news release.

Of course, language is extraordinarily useful now. We couldn’t build something more advanced than a two-story hut out of straw if we couldn’t communicate symbolically, beyond finger pointing and “uga-buga” shouts.

Her point is that many practical problems facing a small, familiar group may not have required it to get started. So, what then, was the evolutionary incentive?

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What humans do differently, Hobaiter and Dominy argue, is keep communicating after the practical business of the day is over — and talk about things beyond the here and now.

The strange social world after sunset

The two researchers build on research by anthropologist Polly Wiessner’s 2014 study of 174 day and nighttime conversations among the Ju/’hoansi of southern Africa. During daylight hours, conversation tended to revolve around immediate concerns: economic matters, day-to-day plans, complaints and gossip about people not present. After dark, the social world expanded. Around the fire, people were much more likely to tell stories, sing, dance and take part in rituals. Often, their stories concerned people and events far removed from the immediate moment, including past generations, distant places and imagined or supernatural worlds.

Wiessner argues that storytelling demands something quite different from coordinating a hunt or deciding where to gather food. It requires people to communicate about things that are not physically present, to hold an audience’s attention over longer stretches of time and to construct events into a narrative with characters, motives and consequences. Ultimately, Wiessner claims, this nighttime storytelling helped transmit cultural knowledge and social norms while strengthening bonds beyond the small group of people involved in everyday tasks.

Hobaiter and Dominy take that argument a step further. Perhaps the fireside did not merely give humans more opportunities to use language, but created the unusual communicative pressures that helped language itself become more abstract, structured and dependent on speech.

Gestures may not work well in firelight

Besides providing a beacon of light and warmth where people naturally gathered, communal fireplaces may have incentivized speech development because it was more practical for communicating in the quasi-dark. People sitting close to the flames can be quite visible, but others further back are less so. Faces and hands drift in and out of shadow. Flames can block the view of someone sitting opposite. And the constant flicker forces the visual system to keep adjusting. Under those conditions, gestures become less dependable, especially across a group. But voice has the same quality whether its day or night.

Once people were regularly gathering after dark, vocal communication may have gained a practical advantage over gesture. Over many generations, the authors suggest, that could have helped shift more of the burden of meaning from the hands to the voice — setting the stage for increasingly elaborate spoken language.

This all is highly hypothetical, but the chronology is at least plausible. Recent research at Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa has found evidence of repeated hominin-associated burning extending back more than a million years, with some layers dated to roughly 1.8 million years ago. That does not prove early humans were sitting around campfires telling stories — archaeologists still debate when fire became routinely controlled and used socially — but it places sustained fire use deep enough in our evolutionary past for the idea to be taken seriously.

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A light source that may have shaped conversation

In foraging societies, fire can extend waking time by roughly four hours. Yet its spectrum contains relatively little of the blue light that most strongly activates melanopsin, the retinal system involved in suppressing melatonin (the hormone that spikes after dark, priming you for sleep). Blue light is emitted by screens from consumer devices, which is why you’ll often hear advice to stop using your phone at least an hour before tucking in for sleep.

Firelight could therefore extend evening social time without disrupting sleep as much as modern, blue-rich lighting. Bright flames may suppress melatonin somewhat, but as the fire fades to embers, its glow falls into a range better suited for preparing for sleep.

Then there is flicker. Using high-speed video, the researchers measured campfire oscillations and found a dominant rate around 2.7 hertz in preliminary data. That sits at the slow end of the roughly 2-to-7-hertz rhythm associated with mouth opening and closing during speech. Visual neurons can synchronize their activity to flickering light, a phenomenon called photic driving.

That’s not to say you can synchronize your brain activity with fire. But a 2023 NeuroImage study of narrative engagement found that more engaged listeners showed greater synchronization across several brain regions while hearing the same story. The hypothesis is that a shared, rhythmic visual stimulus might have reinforced attention and social synchrony while one person held the floor.

Dominy said fire is well studied as a chemical reaction, “but not the properties that draw our attention and focus; that instil harmony and cooperation.”

A theory built to be proven wrong

Language leaves no fossils, which makes origin stories like these highly speculative and virtually unprovable one way or the other. Hobaiter and Dominy acknowledge the problem, writing that their review risks “over-romanticizing firelight.”

But they still stand by it. If the idea is right, storytelling should differ systematically from ordinary conversation across languages. Its rhythm should more closely resemble fire flicker. Gestural comprehension should suffer more than speech under flickering firelight. And storytellers and listeners should show greater physiological or neural synchrony than people engaged in everyday gossip. These claims remain to be tested.

“It’s always intriguing to think about how language started — what was the first word? The first story?” Hobaiter said. The new theory suggests those two questions may be far more closely connected than we thought.

The findings appeared in the Proceedings of the Royal Society.