Episode 81: Firebringer (2016)

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. Win some SotSA Merch! Send your mistakes, inaccuracies, and corrections to us by email or social media: Twitter: @SotSA_Podcast Bluesky: @sotsapodcast.bsky.social Facebook: @SotSAPodcast Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/sotsa/ Email: [email protected] 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/