All that's needed to "tame fire" is to have a predictive-enough model of fire dynamics and a suitable method for constraining its state space. There's nothing that requires "understanding" in the scientific sense, only in the pragmatic sense.
Sure, so maybe all you need to solve intelligence is also a pragmatic approach, like datasets generated by a known intelligence from which a general learning function can infer associations.
Well that's not true. We tamed fire before understanding combustion, friction, heat, or anything else.