comment: >
  
  We have records.  But they conflict.  One lists the inventor as being named "Prometheus".  Another lists "Scaroth" as being the inventor.  The former was a god, and the latter was a Jagaroth.  Neither one was human.  OP, you are dismissing their contributions, just because they weren't human.  Human supremacists are terrible!  OP, you should be ashamed!
context: This is a friendly reminder to read our rules.
  Remember, /r/Showerthoughts is for showerthoughts, not "thoughts had in the shower!"
  (For an explanation of what a "showerthought" is, please read this page.)
  Rule-breaking posts may result in bans. >
  
  There's a movie from 1981 called "Quest for Fire" that's pretty good and espouses that before man learned to create fire himself, he found existing fire and carried it around with him. >
  
  In a time when dinosaurs walked the Earth
  When the land was swamp and caves were home
  In an age when prized possession was fire
  To search the landscapes men would roam >
  
  Who were these people who mastered time travel to walk earth with the dinosaurs but couldn't make a fire? >
  
  The existence of one technology does not imply another one.
  Since we didn't find a way to time travel, we do not know, if making fire is necessary for it, so it is totally possible to have developed time travel, without knowing how to make fire.
  (in reality, usually in Sci fi, if you have video telephones, you have flying cars but we can Skype, zoom or WhatsApp video call today, but still drive on the road) >
  
  We could fly cars if we wanted to, it’s just horribly inefficient to suspend the weight of a car in the air when everywhere we need to go is on the ground, and the places that need elevation to reach it’s more efficient to stick 200 people on 1 plane instead of 200 entire cars burning whatever fuel makes you fly >
  
  We have flying cars, the unpowered runway landing was too dangerous and cumbersome so we gave them vtol capabilities. They're called helicopters. >
  
  I am attracted to you based on this comment alone.
  I'm not going to read any of your others, just in case. ❤️‍🔥 >
  
  Please don't waste your time doing that, but I will let you know that a few months ago there was a post about a newly discovered Egyptian mummy tomb they found, and somebody said I hope they don't open it and release another pandemic, and I said they could call it "SARS COV-agus". 
  ...I understand if the spark is gone >
  
  I suppose a few different people probably figured it out independent from each other. >
  
  And none of them were our species. From some archeology done in East Africa it seems our genus (Homo) had that figured out long before Homo Sapiens came along >
  
  And there you have why we don't have their name. >
  
  What? >
  
  The person who discovered how to put a fire out was pretty important, too. >
  
  I heard it was Oog after he ate it >
  
  His name was Promethius you ass and he's still in prison for it.  SMH >
  
  *Prometheus >
  
  *Oog >
  
  His name was "Oog" and he died five minutes later because he tried to eat it. >
  
  RIP Oog >
  
  OG Oog. Pour one out. >
  
  Dicks out for Oog >
  
  Fire was discovered in a time where it couldn’t be reported to the masses that it can be today, so technically, many people discovered it for the first time, right? >
  
  Probably, like 3 completely unrelated people in different countries figured out how to fly a plane practically at the same time overnight, fire is a lot easier >
  
  But they were aware of the overarching quest of attaining flight as well as the methods and developments for such, at least on a semi-yearly basis, so it's not even the same as prehistory where nobody had any sort of written history and very questionable oral history if any. If anything, fire itself could have been a "discovery" lasting millennia. We needed cooking to even start developing better brains, so everything that happened before mastering fire is just a big blur. >
  
  I imagine that completely realistically it would have been a repeatedly discovered and lost skill. One of the biggest differences between humans and monkeys is that we pass our culture on to the next generation, as opposed to just "monkey see monkey do." Teaching fire building as a skill could literally be one of the main factors in evolving that trait to begin with >
  
  the most important person in history? 
  What about the first person to film a cat? >
  
  I'll give you one better: what about the first person to pet a cat? >
  
  Be happy they discovered it prior to our existing intellectual property laws or you may have needed to pay a royalty on a per log burning basis. >
  
  We didn't start the fire. It was always burning since the world's been turning >
  
  Lightning doesn't start new fires. /s >
  
  I recently watched a video on this, and plot twist, it wasn't a person. I forgot what stage of evolution it was confirmed that we had to know about fire, but our bodies have literally evolved around the use of fire, specifically using it to cook food. Basically, we wouldn't have finished our evolution into the people we are today without it. So you can credit some monkey man for that one >
  
  It was still a person, but not a member of our species. When scientists talk about early humans they are talking about other species in the genus Homo. Even before using fire to outsource some of the work of digestion, Homo started to evolve based on pre-digestion of food using tools. >
  
  I understand where you're coming from. Outside of a fantasy world setting, I've just never heard of anyone other than homo sapiens being referred to as people. Genuinely curious, what's the line? Like when scientists go back to all our stages of evolution, what's the stage that we start to consider them people?
  It felt weirdly immoral to type that last sentence. I just want to state that I think all living things deserve respect, whether or not they are considered people. lol. >
  
  For scientists it's generally the Homo genus that counts as people but they usually use "human" instead of "people." In a lot of languages all over the world, the word that translates as "people" is their name for themselves. Lots of people throughout history (and some today) didn't count humans that were not part of their cultural or ethnic group as people.
  Anyway, the Homo genus split off from the Pan genus (chimps) split somewhere between 13 and 4 million years ago. All of our ancestors back that far are widely considered to be early humans. >
  
  Millions of years of evolution, and yet there are a significant number of homo-Erectus that think the earth is only 7000 yrs old. >
  
  Lightning starts fires you just have to keep it going from place to place. >
  
  Could have been from lava as well considering if I remember correctly volcanic eruptions and large storms were a big thing way back then. >
  
  I was there...can confirm.
  Madd shit. >
  
  How good is it to be monke? >
  
  Y...do you ask >
  
  Well, there is the old Greek myth of Prometheus who stole fire from the gods
  The story is obviously greatly exaggerated, but who's to say the actual guy that discovered fire didn't have the same name? >
  
  It was a man named William Fire who invented the technique of friction to create an ember, thus they named it after him. >
  
  It wasn't Billy Joel, but we're still working through billions of other suspects. >
  
  Ehh it was probably independently discovered by many people, and keep in mind, these people weren't humans as we know them today, they were homo erectus, a human ancestor. And they were called homo erectus due to their erect p[REDACTED].
  *Posture >
  
  Actually they aren’t the most important person in history because I am >
  
  No fire. No written language.
  Seems kind of amazing they could go this long without figuring out fire... it's not a trivial thing by any means, but you'd think a few thousand years with human brains, and someone would work it out. Realize that the friction of rubbing two things together generates heat similar to that of a fire. Then spend a few years trying to connect those dots.
  I suppose necessity is the mother of invention. There's not many of them there, and they found a method to collect fire that works well enough. >
  
  Much like convergent evolution, discovering how to start a fire has likely occurred innumerable times  in separate occasions, especially considering how wide and thinly dispersed early humans were.
  Spears,  bows and arrow have been invented by many cultures independently. >
  
  I'm pretty sure fire was just given to humans. We have been really good at keeping it going all these years though. Go us!
  If you're looking for someone to thank, it would probably be Prometheus. >
  
  It was actually two different people who happened to do it the exact same day. Same village, by some crazy coincidence. They both claimed it first. No one was sure who to believe since they didn't have clocks at the time. >
  
  Even crazier that they got into a fistfight over the credit, both of them died, and control of fire wasn’t rediscovered for 5,000 years! >
  
  I note you used the word person rather than people.   I think there are many things we like to say one person or one country discovered, when logic would tell you that was probably discovered in multiple countries by multiple people.
  And that's probably why they don't have it as one person. >
  
  It probably happened multiple times in multiple places for multiple reasons.  
  Important for sure, but not a single keystone event. >
  
  That's because he did it because he needed it, and didn't do it for the fame >
  
  I’d say it is more than one person, different civilisations utilising fire about the same time. >
  
  It’s likely an invention that was created independently by multiple people around the world >
  
  For me, it's weird to consider that for millions of years fire couldn't exist on Earth >
  
  If that person didn't figure it someone else would have probably very soon. >
  
  Which is ridiculous since it should be so obvious. It's the person with no eyebrows. /s >
  
  I would argue lightning most likely caused a fire, and early humans figured out how to harness and use it rather than have created it. >
  
  It wasn't just one
  Fire was created by many ancient cultures 
  Cultures that never had any exposure to one another >
  
  I would wager that more than one person figured it out across the globe and several thousand years, but youre right they were very important people that we know nothing about. >
  
  I feel like it wasn’t one singular person that created it. I think making something warm using friction was a preexisting knowledge that multiple people had an idea on how to execute in different parts of the world at the same time if that makes any sense at all >
  
  I remember learning in history class that it was actually John Fire who discovered it, and gave it his namesake. >
  
  Yet no one knows who they were.....or what they were doing.  But their legacy remains..... >
  
  Err duh. Its named after him. He was called Berny Fire. His son Blaze N Fire took over the business after Burny's first attempt ended in accidental suicide though. His wife Mel. T Fire was always there to support him too. True Facts source: trustme.com/bernyfireco >
  
  We know today that Chuck Norris didn't discover fire.
  Fire discovered Chuck Norris. >
  
  Only Chuck Norris can explain this joke >
  
  Multiple people found out how to do it independently of each other