Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English,
the show where you can listen to fascinating stories
and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
I'm Alistair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about the history of fire.
We humans are the only animal on Earth that has truly mastered fire.
That has learned to keep it, make it, cook with it, and build entire civilizations around it.
And today we are going to trace that story,
how fire changed our bodies, our minds, the way we interact with one another, and made the modern world possible.
But before we get right into today's episode, I want to remind
you that you can become a member of Leonardo English and follow along with the interactive transcript
and subtitles over on the website, which is leonardoenglish.com.
Membership of Leonardo English gives you access to more than double the number of episodes,
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So if you are ready to take the next step on your English learning journey, the place to go is leonardoenglish.com.
Okay then, let's not waste a minute and get right into it.
There is a cave in South Africa called Wunderwerk.
The name means miracle in Afrikaans.
This cave contains up to seven meters of sediment, deposits, layers that have built up millimeter
by millimeter over hundreds of thousands of years, like a huge tower of human and even pre-human history.
About one metre down, in a layer dating to roughly one million years ago,