From Nature:
For much of human history, our impact on forests has been much more benign, argues biologist Roland Ennos. Even while using wood to make spears, tools, axe handles, huts and boats, our forebears found ways to protect the source of this most versatile material. Superior skills with wood had an outsize role in our evolution, from an ability to sharpen digging sticks with teeth or stones — a skill ascribed to semi-arboreal early hominins — to the control of fire, which enabled our ancestors to cook meat, allowing them to absorb more energy from it than from raw flesh, and so maintain a larger brain.
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