While listening to David Reich's podcast, he put forward a weird fact which I hadn't heard about before. Roughly 32 minutes into the podcast, Reich, while discussing the issue of small groups of humans while we spread across the globe, says "An example I've heard talked about in this context is what happened with Indigenous Tasmanians. About 10,000 years ago, the ancestors of people in Tasmania—this large island south of Australia—were continuous with the aboriginal populations of Australia. They had fire, but they lost it because it got forgotten somehow. It's a cold place. They just forgot it. The cultural knowledge lost it."
This is a striking thought, a group of humans who lost the ability to light a fire!
I decided to check some scientific studies to validate if this was true or not. A 2024 paper by Aeleye et al., (Landscape burning facilitated Aboriginal migration into Lutruwita/Tasmania 41,600 years ago) reported that the first humans to reach Tasmania (which at that time was a peninsula linked to the main continental area of Australia by an emerged Bass Strait modified the landscape using fire: "People were living on the Tasmanian/Lutruwitan peninsula by ~41.6 ka using fire to penetrate and manipulate forests, an approach possibly used in the first migrations across the last glacial landscape of Sahul." Then came the end of the Last Ice Age, and the strait flooded, leaving a 150 mile - 240 km wide stretch of water isolating the Tasmanian aboriginals from those on the mainland. So they surely lost the art of fire-making more recently.
Völger, 1973 gives an interesting account, and says that researchers considered Tasmanian people "archaic" and although they "were masters in the art of handling fire it has remained in the dark up to our time how they lit it" she cites some authors, among which Plomley does not attribute them with the knowledge of fire-making. She points out that regardless of the method employed, the humid, damp, cold conditions of Tasmania would have made it very difficult to light a fire, so that is why the natives "always carried torches and glowing pieces of rolled bark with them no European has ever observed them lighting a fire"
In 1914, James Walker in his book Early Tasmania (p. 269) believes they imported the know-how on firemaking (and other techniques) after contact with the Europeans, when contact with the mainland was reestablished: "We find that in popular accounts they have been credited with a skill and knowledge in various matters, which it is now well-nigh certain they derived from contact with other races, and of which, in their original condition, they were ignorant. Some instances may be given of imported arts which Bonwick, West, and others, even including such a cautious writer as Brough Smyth, have accepted as originally known to the Tasmanians. I may mention the reputed manufacture of ground stone implements, the use of handled implements, of the womera or throwing stick, and of bone-pointed or jagged spears, the making of different patterns of baskets, the alleged use of the fire-drill, and the drawings attributed to them. In all these matters the evidence collated by Mr. Roth goes to show that any knowledge they may have had of these things was acquired after they had come into contact with Australians or Europeans" In the following pages, Walker discusses fire: "The early voyagers, seeing rough stone implements resembling flint at the camping places, jumped to the conclusion that the natives obtained fire by percussion of flints. This supposed method may be dismissed from consideration, and the question resolves itself into an inquiry as to how they obtained fire by the. usual savage method of the friction of two pieces of wood" So they did know how to make fire, he suggests they used a grooved plank and a stick rubbing in it to light a flame (and that they did not use the "drill" method).
Francis Peron's book about the voyage on the Casuarina between 1800 and 1807 published the engraving shown above about Diemen's Land, now Tasmania and it shows the Aboriginals around a fire.
On the other hand, Rebe Taylor 2008 looked into the matter (The polemics of making fire in Tasmania: the historicalevidence revisited), concluding that "...the idea that the Tasmanian Aborigines could not make fire was never more than supposition. While the contrasting claim that they could make fire has never been an absolute certainty, it is the far more logical and probable conclusion" So, Taylor considers that the knowledge of fire making was never lost.
Though Taylor cites several explorers from the 1800s who said the natives could not make fire (due to the damp conditions) by rubbing wood sticks, or did not know how to light fires, she believes the opposite.
Taylor says that the current belief in the lost art of fire-making is due to Plomley's, 1966 publication stating that the Tasmanians couldn't light fire, followed by Jones in 1977, who suggested that they lost the know-how on how to make hafted axes, boomerangs and fire because they were a small, isolated population whose culture had degenerated.
I would like to point out that the Fuegian natives, and the Chono and Alakaluf people of Southwestern Patagonia, a region that is rain-drenched year round, damp, cold, wet, dripping forests, with hardly a dry piece of wood, managed to light fires and keep them lit even in their canoes, on a bed of sand. The Yamana or Yaghan canoe people used flint and stone (no wood rubbing in Tierra del Fuego, it was far too wet).
The material culture of the Tasmanian natives was poor, and simple when the Europeans discovered the Island in the late 1700s. They probably lost the art of fire-making, did they kindle flames from lighting lit fires? Could a culture lose such a basic and essential knowledge? The equally bare Fuegian and western Patagonian natives had minimal material objects, but they were well adapted to their environment, they fashioned harpoons, hooks, canoes, and mastered their fires.
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