Richard Wrangham wrote in Catching Fire that the use of fire is what made us more human, or perhaps “transitioned” us to becoming human. Its ability to shrink the overall size of food and increase calorie density supposedly aided in brain growth.
James George Frazer’s compilation of myths of the origins of fire is more interesting. All cultures have a fire origin myth: many Native American groups talk of an animal stealing a sacred fire from some unnamed, previous people, and this animal becomes the totemic founder of their (presumably matrilineal) group. The Greeks believed Prometheus brought fire down from heaven. That’s definitely what lightning would look like.
Interestingly, there are no myths on the origin of ROBA, though there are some myths on the origin of “violence.” Hesiod speaks of the origin of violence coming from the iron age, but presumably men in the stone age did not have “violence.” Hesiod might have only considered “violence” the unbridled warfare that characterized the transition from bronze to iron age combat, aka The Catastrophe. The Bible documents various origins of violence: Cain is the first murderer, though we don’t know what weapon he used. Jubilees claims it was a stone tool, but Jasher (a forgery) I think is more accurate in calling it an iron implement. Not that the first people had iron tools; the Cain and Abel story might simply be an iron age story, injected into the Originary story of mankind, cautioning against violence as being contagious. Stone age weaponry might not have been seen as so dangerous. Noah’s story is probably more a cautionary tale of stone age violence: mankind is generally violent on the planet, so Elohim wipes them out with a flood, and Noah “restarts” the world “correctly” by transitioning to patrilineal descent with his sons taking the world as inheritance, and the Noahide Covenant states that Elohim will not wipe out the world from violence again: man is in charge of dealing with that now. I think the closest we can get to a myth on the origin of ROBA would be the Tree of Knowledge. It doesn’t say anything specifically about man suddenly being able to use ROBA, but the author clearly was trying to understand how man could have gone from “Edenic” to sinful (presumably, violent).
(Nowadays I read the Bible as a sort of theological and political treatise on kinship: 1) matrilineal descent among the “gentiles” (nations) is evil because it produces polytheism, and it must be overcome with patrilineal descent which will ensure the land inheritance makes its way to both Judah and Levi, however 2) patrilineal descent isolated Israel and also produced incessant warfare among some of the surrounding nations, culminating in the Babylonian Exile. The tension here is between avoiding intermarriage with nations while maintaining one’s group identity within a nearly endogamous, patrilineal system.)
Fire however continues to be a sticking point. Are we human because of fire? Or did we master fire because we became human? This kind of inquiry is circular and probably pointless; we will never know. But the ROBA Hypothesis would ask the question in a different light: What was the symbolic purpose of fire? I can only imagine 2 things, which might have happened one after the other: 1) in avoiding reaching for the central object, the carcass, fire might have consumed it instead, but after the fire goes out, the carcass still remained and could be distributed more easily, shared among the community, in which it was sublimated, and 2) fire produced a new center around which gestures could be more easily discerned.
Perhaps there was no way for this Originary Scene to be completed without fire. Where did the fire come from? Perhaps it was already there: a tree had already been on fire. Perhaps the Scene, which was threatening to descend into apocalyptic violence due to the presence of ROBA, was in the vicinity of a fire, and they dragged the carcass to the fire to get rid of it, perhaps thinking this would rid themselves of the threat of violence. Less likely would be a Scene where the antagonists surround a carcass, threaten each other with ROBA, and a lightning strike occurres then and there, igniting a fire, which can be used to burn the carcass.
After witnessing the capacity of fire to morph a carcass into a shared object, fire could be used in sacrifice, and later cooking. I can’t imagine fire usage would have preceded it. Naturally this is the view of mainstream science, who believe that fire began as some kind of economical way to eat more food, or to make stuff taste better. These ideas are pure retcon. They don’t think of the sacred. They probably think it’s weird, or quaint, but not useful. Yet all human history is a history of the sacred, and fire usage is always sacred first.
Frazer has an interesting study in The Golden Bough about oak trees being more conducive to lightning strikes than, say, evergreens, which is why oaks are always associated with war gods, while evergreens tend to be more associated with fertility.