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Did our early ancestors boil their food in hot springs?
- moltar 6y agoI’d be surprised if they didn’t. If a crow can figure out how to drop nuts under the car path, then I’m sure early humans have figured out a bunch of stuff too.
- galago 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catching_Fire:_How_Cooking_Made_Us_Human https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catching_Fire:_How_Cooking_Mad...
- sfmike 6y agohere in tamsui in taiwan they cooked eggs in the hot springs
- verst 6y agoSo instead of 淡水 (Tamsui / Danshui) more like 蛋水 (Both of these sound the same with the same tones, but I replaced the first character with the one for egg of the same sound, hence meaning egg water.)
- novia 6y agoThey also make spa boiled eggs in Japan (温泉卵) https://www.seriouseats.com/2016/08/how-to-make-onsen-tamago-japanese-poached-egg.html https://www.seriouseats.com/2016/08/how-to-make-onsen-tamago...
- theironlily 6y agoah yes, the original sous vide method of cooking ;)
- BerislavLopac 6y agoMy personal favourite hypothesis is that they lived in hot springs.
- zygy 6y agoA few years ago I visited Niigata and some surrounding semi-rural towns where people still do this. They have onsens that are designated for food, not people. :)
- _Microft 6y agoI had to look up "onsen". It's the japanese term for hot springs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onsen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onsen
- SubiculumCode 6y agoWhat I never understood is why cooking was needed by early humans. Other animals eat raw food, and scavengers don't even eat freshly killed food, yet they do just fine. Sure, I can understand as humans moved to cooked food that we may have lost our ability to handle food in these states. The only thing I could think of is that the caloric advantage of digesting meat offered an immediate advantage.
- brnt 6y agoOur gastrointestinal tract is designed for fruit, like most apes. Not plant or meat. Out of adaptation to new locales without abundant fruit, we've had to learn how to properly preprocess things were not very good at processing ourselves.
- adrianN 6y agoChimps are known to hunt and eat meat. Bonobos too.
- brnt 6y agoIts important to distinguish the majority of diet with the occasional snack, which often happens to supplement a particular nutrient or mineral. My cats eat vegetables daily too, but it only makes up a percent of their diet.
- msla 6y agoExcept chimps hunt, and get important nutrients from meat, early humans hunted and scavenged meat, and nothing about our digestive system allows us to get as much out of plant matter (including fruit) as an herbivore can; for one thing, we can't digest cellulose. https://www.americanscientist.org/article/meat-eating-among-the-earliest-humans https://www.americanscientist.org/article/meat-eating-among-...
- brnt 6y agoSee reply to other comment. The reason to eat fruit is to get easy access to sugar, which we need especially due to our brains. Like how some birds require nectar to be able to power their flight. All animals supplement diets, but despite cows licking saltstone we still observe them getting the majority of intake from other sources.
- knodi123 6y agoIt's a regular part of Maori culture in New Zealand, and tourists can do it in places like Rotorua. They call it Hāngi. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C4%81ngi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C4%81ngi
- samatman 6y agoWhile I'm quite sure this is true (that Maori boil food in hot springs), the link you've provided describes what in Hawai'i we call kalua, the centrepiece of a luau. I'm not at all surprised that the word for the pit oven is effectively the same: umu in Maori, imu in Hawai'ian.
- EdwardDiego 6y agoAnd the Hawai'ian word for chicken is the Māori word for a bunch of birds that grew up to 2m tall and was probably terrifying to run into in dense scrub. :)
- markdown 6y agoA Hangi is an earth oven, not cooking in hot springs. In Fiji, it's called a lovo. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_oven https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_oven
- phonethrowaway 6y agoRúgbrauð (Icelandic pronunciation: [ˈruːɣprœiθ]) is an Icelandic straight rye bread. It is traditionally baked in a pot or steamed in special wooden casks by burying it in the ground near a hot spring, in which case it is known as hverabrauð or "hot-spring-bread". https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%BAgbrau%C3%B0 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%BAgbrau%C3%B0
- tzury 6y agoIn the Talmud[1] they refer[2] cooking in the Hot Springs of Tiberius in a casual manner that makes the impression it was a regular thing to do. "...Likewise one who cooks with the hot springs of Tiberius or that which is similar to them is exempt..." We are talking about an era where fire exists, indeed, and yet some were still doing do. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talmud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talmud [2] https://www.sefaria.org.il/Mishneh_Torah%2C_Sabbath.9.3?vhe=Torat_Emet_363&lang=bi&with=all&lang2=bi https://www.sefaria.org.il/Mishneh_Torah%2C_Sabbath.9.3?vhe=...
- kace91 6y agoWhat were they exempt from? It's a bit off topic but now I'm curious...
- danielheath 6y ago> an era where fire exists The labor-cost of energy (food, wood-burning, gasoline, electrical) is a pretty huge factor in human endeavor. Cooking on a hot-spring is thrifty. Local wood runs out quickly when you have lots of people.
- ChrisMarshallNY 6y agoSo...Shabu-Shabu is the oldest cooking method. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shabu-shabu https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shabu-shabu
- 082349872349872 6y agoIn our times "dishwasher cooking" is a productive search term.
- sradman 6y agoThe landing page for the paper Microbial biomarkers reveal a hydrothermally active landscape at Olduvai Gorge at the dawn of the Acheulean, 1.7 Ma [1] states: > The geothermal activity described here may have influenced the use of the space at Olduvai Gorge and may have provided advantages, such as cooking, which has not been previously contemplated in the context of human evolution. The discovered hydrothermal feature overlaps with the timelines of H. erectus. Richard Wrangham’s book Catching Fire [2] argues that the evidence for the consumption of energy dense food processed by fire is found in the physiology (small teeth, small gut, large brain) and reach (Eurasia) of erectus. The speculation about hot spring cooking distracts from the significance of the find, in my opinion. [1] https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/09/14/2004532117 https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/09/14/2004532117 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catching_Fire:_How_Cooking_Made_Us_Human https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catching_Fire:_How_Cooking_Mad...
- 4cao 6y agoThey were lucky to be using hot springs with temperatures north of 80°C (176°F). Not sure what the median temperature of a hot spring is but anecdotally it seems many are not that hot, which makes them perfect breeding ground for amebas and also the Legionella bacteria.
- Arubis 6y agoPresumably, humans consistently using hot springs such as the ones you describe to prepare food either found the experience punishing or simply didn’t live to record the results.
- Giorgi 6y agoI don't know about cooking because thermal waters tend to be sulfuric but for example - Tbilisi was a settlement of hunters who would use "free" hot water to make animal leather soft. Archaeologists discovered evidence of continuous habitation of the Tbilisi - since the early Bronze Age, and stone artifacts dating to the Paleolithic age.