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/