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The earliest campfires likely stoked human bonding, traditions and imagination — helping us connect and form broader societies.
Firelight "mellows and also excites people. It's intimate," writes University of Utah anthropology professor Polly Wiessner, who studied the Kalahari Bushmen, a group of hunters and gatherers in southern Africa for about 40 years.
Wiessner's findings were published online Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Such hearthside stories, she wrote, were some of the "original social media."
Researchers couldn't tell from their observations exactly what happened thousands of years ago. But they say the Bushmen's current existence looks like the way human ancestors lived for most of our history, so they provide a helpful window into how fire could have shaped societies.
Today, the Bushmen gather around a community hearth in groups of about 15. Group chats center on hunts, fights over meat, marriage and births, murder, getting lost, gossip about other groups, truck breakdowns, run-ins with animals, and who might be sleeping around. Traditional myths come up, too.
Researchers believe the first such conversations happened as many as 1 million years ago, when pockets of human ancestors started to control fire.
In the university's study, researchers compared fireside stories they recorded in 1974 and others from 2011 and 2012, told at Kalahari homes in parts of Botswana and Namibia.
In both cases, daytime chatter revolved mostly around working and getting food, along with griping and gossip.
But in the evening, four out of five conversations focused on stories, both real and mythical. At night, only 7 percent of the conversations were complaints and 4 percent revolved around economic worries.
The tales reinforced the group's arranged marriages, family governing systems and a wider social structure based on sharing food and land and healing and helping neighbors who are in trouble, the U. team found.
Fireside groups talked about people who were dead, belonged to other groups or who simply weren't immediately present. They also sang and chatted about what they said were spiritual forces. Healers danced and induced trances to help cure sick people.
Feeling connected to other groups — whether miles down the road or in a spiritual realm — was key in forming societies, Wiessner said. She argues modern Western societies are continuing the tradition by Facebooking, tweeting, Instagramming and otherwise linking to people in other places.
The question of how digital screens are shaping our habits and traditions, researchers say, is a topic for another study.