It's been reported that 1.6 million years ago in Africa that man first learnt how to
make fire by rubbing sticks.
Now it's that method that I'm gonna show you here now.
Now basically the timber that you gather in the bush can be any sort of white soft timber,
and it needs to be dried out.
Now these pieces here, I've obviously dried these out and they're ready to go.
And I'm just gonna show you the ability.
And what it's called is, it's called the hand, hand drill method.
So basically you need a block, and you need a drill.
And you'll notice this is a, quite a straight piece of stick which makes it easier for me
to rub through my hands.
So this is all dried out and it's nice and light.
So I'm gonna fashion the end of it into a rounded section.
Now this end here which is my base, my base here, I'm going to fashion a hole or a hollow
so to speak, because this is what my drill is going to ride into.
Alright, so I've got a base, because I need this base here in order to collect the dust
that I'm gonna generate.
But first of all I need to bed, I need to bed my drill into my base.
Now I'm actually not going to make fire just yet.
I'm just gonna bed it in.
Alright, so I've bedded that in.
you can see it's already starting to smoke.
Now what I want to do is I want to collect that dust into one point, so that's where
I make a little incision here in the side.
Alright, there we go, that looks like it's enough.
And that, that little groove there is what's going to collect the hot dust.
And it's the hot dust, it's that hot dust that I wanna collect.
And if I can get it hot enough, it will actually turn into an ember.
Alright, now I've spent a bit of time practicing, conditioning my hands.
Conditioning my hands to do it, because it takes a lot of endurance.
And I've practiced for years to learn how to do this.
Because it's quite easy to create the du—, the smoke, but to turn that into an ember,
that is the secret.
And there it is.
That's the ember there.
The hot ember.
That ember isn't fire yet, so I need to turn that into flame.
So I've got a bed here, a nest.
What I call a tinder nest.
And I'm gonna grab that.
Don't lose it.
I'm gonna grab that and put that in the middle of my nest.
And there was man's ability to create fire.
1.6 million years ago.
On the continent of Africa.
And it was that, that there, is what changed man's diet, because he then started to eat
meat.
Less vegetation and more meat.
And it was there man started to evolve.
His stomach changed.
He could then process the meat in his stomach.
So he would cook it and eat it.
He then would not only use the fire to cook food, he would use the fire for warmth.
He would use the fire for ceremonies.
So the ability to start fire.
And, and now days, you think it's easy.
You grab the lighter; you grab the matches.
But ancient man, fire to him was so important and was so critical to his survival.