Why humans find fire so mesmerizing

There’s a particular kind of trance that takes hold when you gaze into a glowing, flickering campfire—the kind where you don’t even notice that your marshmallow has gone from toasty treat to active volcano to some kind of science experiment gone horribly wrong, all while you were looking right at it. Fire has mesmerized us for as long as we’ve known how to control it. It warms us, feeds us, and lights our homes.

But something else is clearly going on: right alongside premium entertainment and live sports, streaming services like Netflix somehow find room in their lineup for hours of fireplace footage. For humans, anyway, fire is more than just a practicality—it’s closer to a fixation. Dr.

Daniel M.T. Fessler, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, has a theory about why.

He maintains that kids who grow up building fires out of necessity actually lose interest in fire once they’ve mastered it. The fascination so many of us carry into adulthood, he argues, might just be unfinished business. “Once people get good at building fire,” Fessler says, “they’re just not as interested in it anymore.”

Master it, and the magic disappears Fessler’s original research on this dates back more than two decades, when he and his wife, an anthropologist, spent nearly three years conducting ethnographic research in Southwestern Sumatra, a large Indonesian island west of Java. They lived in a community where most households cooked over a wood fire, and only a few had transitioned to kerosene stoves. In these communities, Fessler observed, kids were around fire from the time they could walk, and often had more unsupervised free time than most American kids.

Six-year-olds scooped embers from the family cooking fire so they could “bake” their mud pies—tiny imitations of the meals they watched the adults cook every day. By age 10, Fessler says, kids in this community had complete mastery of fire, matching that of “any American outdoor guy.” And that was e