Fire, Cells, and Circuits: From Hominins to Humans

What does it mean to tell the human story before the Holocene, before agriculture, before the Bronze Age, before cities, and before the world that we usually recognize as “civilization”?

In this presentation, we will step back into deep time and follow the long arc from early hominins to Homo sapiens. We will begin in the Miocene, around the time our lineage split from the lineage leading to chimpanzees and bonobos, and move through the Pliocene and Pleistocene toward the threshold of the Holocene.

Along the way, we will look at some of the major figures in the human story, from early hominins and australopithecines to early Homo, Homo erectus, Neanderthals, Denisovans, and Homo sapiens. Rather than treating this as a simple ladder of progress, we will explore a branching, uncertain, and often surprising evolutionary landscape.

The goal is not just to ask when “humans” appeared, but to ask how the pieces of the human condition came together: bipedality, tool use, fire, migration, cooperation, cumulative culture, symbolic behavior, and the expanding capacity to reshape environments.

This event will also set up the next major transition in the Fire arc: the move from deep time into the Holocene, where the question changes from how humans became human to how humans became dominant.