From an Iowa State press release:
Humans were thought to process a unique ability to use fire, but now anthropologist Jill Pruetz reports that savanna chimpanzees in Senegal have a near human understanding of wildfires and change their behavior in anticipation of fire’s movement.
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Pruetz says it was hard to find previous research on how other animals interacted with fire. But the few examples that she and LaDuke found—such as elephants’ encounters with similar wildfires—reported that those animals were highly stressed and experienced high mortality rates.
In their paper, the researchers wrote that the control of fire by humans involves the acquisition of these three cognitive stages: conceptualization of fire, ability to control fire, and ability to start a fire.
According to Pruetz, the Fongoli chimpanzees have mastered the first stage, which is the prerequisite to the other two.
It seems like there should be some distinction between wildfires and a campfire. Admittedly, if early hominins conceptualized small and large fires as a continuum, it probably would have facilitated their ability to exploit naturally-created fires as a source of fire for themselves. I could imagine them feeding a fire remnant to cook animals who had perished in a wildfire, for example. Or as Richard Wrangham has suggested, developing a taste for the "cooked" plants that remain in the wake of a wildfire. All this would be easier if early hominins were exploratory around fire instead of blindly fearful of it.
But if the chimpanzees perceive natural fire on a continuum with small fires, Pruetz' observations shouldn't be surprising. Captive chimpanzees can be trained to make and use fire (using human technologies like matches) and readily tolerate small fires. Semi-wild orangutans also can make fire using human implements. I would tend to think they should be more wary of large natural fires, but the savanna chimps encounter it so regularly they may have figured out how to tolerate it.
