Recent years have witnessed a growing number of stories about extreme wildfires that have had significant social impacts, from Australia to Portugal to California. Although this has heightened the call to find ways to better “coexist with fire,” it must be recognized that wildfire-human interactions are as old as humanity itself. Humans around the world have ignited and used fire as a basic tool for millennia; people have and continue to use confined fires for a range of quotidian reasons including cooking, heating, and processing of materials (e.g., in the production of brick, ceramics, metals). Use of broadcast landscape fire for hunting, gathering, agriculture, and construction purposes is another age-old practice. Although more recently such broadscale burning has become frowned on in many places, particularly more industrialized countries, the current practice of prescribed fire derives from these traditions. The use of landscape fire was and continues to be indispensable to our evolution as a species and to the development of our many and diverse social and economic systems.