Like, you could imagine a universe in which the very first person to start capturing and starting fire for other people to use was an incredible genius who thought to themselves, 'Well, this requires fuel, that gets transformed, and in the process of being transformed gets used up which is why fires don't just go on burning forever, and you need to make things hotter before they start rearranging themselves in the way that produces heat, so if you get a hot-enough fire you can feed a bunch of things into it that get transformed and used as fuel and release a lot more heat."

But it's a publicly known fact that fire was invented by the ancestors of humanity before they started looking completely human, before continuing heritage-selection had transformed their shapes in a direction that ended up human.  So on the order of hundreds of thousands or millions of years ago.  People would have been actually genuinely legitimately stupider back then.

They might not have had language to describe the bright-pretty-hot-thing, only known that it was bright and pretty and hot.

Like, you could imagine a universe in which the very first person to start capturing and selling fire for other people to use was an incredible genius who thought to themselves, 'Well, this requires fuel, that gets transformed, and in the process of being transformed gets used up which is why fires don't just go on burning forever, and you need to make things hotter before they start rearranging themselves in the way that produces heat, so if you get a hot-enough fire you can feed a bunch of things into it that get transformed and used as fuel and release a lot more heat."

But it's a publicly known fact that fire was invented by the ancestors of humanity before they started looking completely human, before continuing heritage-selection had transformed their shapes in a direction that ended up human.  So on the order of hundreds of thousands or millions of years ago.  People would have been actually genuinely legitimately stupider back then.

They might not have had language to describe the bright-pretty-hot-thing, only known that it was bright and pretty and hot.

Like, you could imagine a universe in which the very first person to start using fire was an incredible genius who thought to themselves, 'Well, this requires fuel, that gets transformed, and in the process of being transformed gets used up which is why fires don't just go on burning forever, and you need to make things hotter before they start rearranging themselves in the way that produces heat, so if you get a hot-enough fire you can feed a bunch of things into it that get transformed and used as fuel and release a lot more heat."

But it's a publicly known fact that fire was invented by the ancestors of humanity before they started looking completely human, before continuing heritage-selection had transformed their shapes in a direction that ended up human.  So on the order of hundreds of thousands or millions of years ago.  People would have been actually genuinely legitimately stupider back then.

They might not have had language to describe the bright-pretty-hot-thing, only known that it was bright and pretty and hot.

Like, you could imagine a universe in which the very first person to start using fire was an incredible genius who thought to themselves, "Well, this requires fuel, that gets transformed, and in the process of being transformed gets used up which is why fires don't just go on burning forever, and you need to make things hotter before they start rearranging themselves in the way that produces heat, so if you get a hot-enough fire you can feed a bunch of things into it that get transformed and used as fuel and release a lot more heat."

But it's a publicly known fact that fire was invented by the ancestors of humanity before they started looking completely human, before continuing heritage-selection had transformed their shapes in a direction that ended up human.  So on the order of hundreds of thousands or millions of years ago.  People would have been actually genuinely legitimately stupider back then.

They might not have had language to describe the bright-pretty-hot-thing, only known that it was bright and pretty and hot.