Freud's theory of the domestification of fire, presented as a footnote in Civilization and Its Discontents, pp 34-35:

Psychoanalytical material, while incomplete and impossible to interpret with any certainty, at least allows a surmise- a fantastic sounding one- about the origin of this great human achievement. It is as though primitive man was in the habit, when confronted with fire, of using it to satisfy an infantile desire by urinating on it and so putting it out. Extant legends leave us no doubt about the original phallic interpretation of the tongues of flame stretching upwards. Extinguishing a fire by urinating on it- an activity still resorted to by the latter-day giants Gulliver in Lilliput and Rabelais' Gargantua- was therefore like a sexual act performed with a man, an enjoyment of male potency in homosexual rivalry. Whoever first renounced this pleasure and spared the fire was able to take it away with him and make it serve his purposes. By damping down the fire of his own sexual excitement he had subdued the natural force of fire. This great cultural conquest would thus be the reward for forgoing the satisfaction of a drive. Moreover, it is as though the man had charged the woman with guarding the fire, now held prisoner on the domestic hearth, because her anatomy made it impossible for her to yield to such a temptation. It is remarkable too how regularly analytical findings testify to the link between ambition, fire and urinal eroticism

Freud is an inspired man and has no need of data; he soars straight into interpretation. Interpretation of what?

When we see what Freud says about "primal man" it's clear that his mental image is as abstract and unreal as his term. There's no such thing as primal man. There are only real people each living a real life in some real place at some real time. In the era of fire's domestication, that would be the African savannah, perhaps half a million years ago; and the fire would be wildfire sweeping across the plain, as it does - the only natural fire there. When savannah wildfire came through, the real men who lived there had a number of real and important things to think about. It was a lethal threat to them and their families, to all their possessions - shelters, implements, food stores; and on the positive side it presented a hunting opportunity.

A premise of the hypothesis is that the men involved had a profound urge to urinate on fire. One source of data from which one can try to extrapolate back to the past is the modern human. A real scientist who seriously wondered about this might set up a blind in a campground - and would there observe that they do not. I have spent many hours around campfires, with humans or sometimes merely in a human state myself - enough data to be quite sure that the premise is false. Young humans are often moved to take sticks from fires and wave them around in the dark, because they make glowing patterns in the night air - but Freud would either find a genital interpetation for this, or he would ignore it.

The other basic method which people seriously pondering the lives of distant ancestors employ is observation of our primate relatives. A key question would be, do male baboons confronted with savannah wildfire display any interest in urinating on it? Has any Freudian ever been moved to check? Of course not. Once the thesis is brought into the real world it is too silly to be taken seriously, even by them. Imagination undisciplined by logical assessment wanders off into daydreams; and here we have a cult devoted to studying the daydreams of their genius.

A second premise so silly that its falsity is obvious on notice concerns the size and distribution of natural fires. Note that the claim is not merely that an urge existed, but that restraining it "spared the fire." For that to be true, in this imagined world not merely some, not merely most, but all the wildfires had to be of a size to be extinguished with a cup or so of urine - perhaps the size of a saucer. (Stop and think, as Freud never did: that is a logical requirement of the supposed connection. Otherwise the man could have his fun with plenty of fire left to take home.) And the Primal Man had to encounter these little saucers with a full bladder every time - so they had to be rare, and sparsely distributed; and Primal Man had to habitually refrain from just peeing in the bushes so that he was charged up and ready to go...

Real wildfires simply do not exist as cute little isolated fantasy saucers of flame. They start with a lightning strike - and after that they are always either growing or dying. Wildfire is a flowing thing - active at its perimeter, a complex, unstable phenomenon. Putting them out is seldom attempted. You try to contain them at the perimeter and you wait for them to die. This is dangerous work, because the wind can carry the fire past your barriers, and takes amounts of water measured in tons.

In a science - where logical assessment is the basic and continual activity - these failures to notice inconsistency with fact would have been noticed. The critics, after they stopped hooting with astonished laughter, might have enjoyed the use of drily measured terms: "The hypothesis presumes a size distribution among wildfires which is not plausible" - followed by the devastating details. And that would be that. Hypothesis disproven by identification of a false premise; imposter discredited forever (and established as a joke and a legend). How do you decide if a hypothesis is true? If you're a scientist you identify its premises and its implications - you trace its logical connections upwards and downwards - until you identify a fallacy, or satisfy yourself that none exist. That's the procedure - logical assessment; very simple and well-defined, one of the essential and elementary components of science: and Freud, and all the people capable of accepting what he says, have no idea that this is the activity. As far as they know, all you do is consult your genius. We perform logical assessment; they perform oraculation.

Freud consulting his genius in isolation not only from observation but even from seriously imagined reality had come to the conclusion that the key to history and human life is an endless obsession with genital organs. The domestication of fire being the challenge, what he generated was a genitally-themed story which collapses instantly under proper logical assessment. The fact that he never noticed this vulnerability means, of course, that he never performed proper logical assessment: the basic, continual procedure of real science and real intelligence.

If one is speculating about the biological rationale of cultural practices originating in prehistory what would be the correct infratheory? Any reference to evolution? Despite his comparison of himself to Darwin as a worldmind, Freud displays no sense whatsoever that Darwin's grand explanation of the nature and history of life on Earth - including every species and every attribute of every species - might have something to say about the nature and history of human motives. No - the only references are to literary works - political satires from the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Freud sounds like an author from the prescientific era - but this was written in 1930: 73 years - three generations - after the Origin of Species. Not only was Freud no contributor to science, he was illiterate about both its processes and its signal achievements.

Having read this single paragraph - and knowing that Freud's collected works (which people did bother to collect and publish, and still spend the precious hours of their lives reading and studying in earnest quest for wisdom) run to 24 volumes of such stuff - are you moved to ever read another paragraph? Why would you, except as a case study in the mechanisms of self-delusion? You might as well hope for wisdom in the ravings of some outcast on a streetcorner.

It is reminiscent of another twentieth century cult which arose because people saw the power of science and technology and tried to get a piece of it the best way they knew how - with the best understanding of its mechanism which their cultural background enabled them to form: the Pacific Island cargo cults. People living in the stone age suddenly see silver things bigger than war canoes sailing through the sky and coming into their world bearing wonders. The war ended and the planes left, and the islanders wanted them back - so they got themselves stoked up on kava or whatever their intoxicant was, and waved their bone rattles or whatever their charms were, because to them the great silver birds were magic and maybe magic sould bring them back. Freud got himself stoked up on cocaine - and maybe sometimes the simple euphoria of the triumphant hero - and went off into his study to reinterpret history and explain the inner workings of the mind through an act of sheer genius unhampered by any contact with data. 

Why did anyone believe Freud's nonsense? They wanted a prophet. They thought they needed a prophet - a genius. Anyone who spoke humbly and sensibly clearly lacked the magic inspiration. The same delusions which made Freud act out the myth of the genius made them accept the portrayal as authentic. The same mechanism explains religious cults and the art market. A market where valuation is based on the perception of genius obviously collapses with the genius myth.

He thinks they are words of genius precious to humanity forever; an impression derived not from study of their content but from reverence for their source. Howard Hughes used to save his own urine in big bottles; at some Hindu ashrams the devotees are honored to drink the guru's bathwater. And the words of Freud are precious in a similar way to those with similar faith.