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When I first read this a question jumped out at me: Wait, Neanderthals were able to render fat? That requires boiling, and doesn't boiling require pottery? Th

• 14 1y ago
  Yes if you search youtube you can find people showing how to boil water inside a plastic bag. Typically they show this in survival situation scenarios. You apparently can also do it in a wooden container if done right. But as to your question wouldn't they need to have pots? Well I know we don't have evidence of that but it wouldn't surprise me. Another method show for survival shows a person taking a fallen tree and building a fire by it. Then you place some hot burning pieces on top of the log. Keep adding them and burning on top of the log until it burns a bowl sized indentation. Then you take a rock or stick and scrape the hole and get it clean sort of. Then you put water into that and if no container to carry water is shows soaking a shirt and carrying it that way. After the large bowl sized hole is filled with water you take a few rocks that were sitting in the fire and drop them in. You will be amazed how fast it will boil the water. This is done to allow you to drink from a potentially unsafe water source. I guess what I am thinking is that there are probably dozens of ways they could have achieved it. Ways that with our knowledge of today escapes us but to them it was common knowledge. If I had to take a guess they would have used rocks and use a large flat rock and encircle that rock with rocks making a pit or rocks then covered the sides with dirt. Then dug a hole under part of the large flat rock and made fire under it. This primitive pot would not work well at first but my guess is that as fat melted and oozed into the cracks it would eventually seal and then would work very well to boil things. Anyways just fun to think about I know very little about the time period.
  • netcan 1y ago
    >But as to your question wouldn't they need to have pots? "Pottery" tends to assume ceramics. In Neolithic and later sites that had pottery, ceramic remains typically represent 99% of the total artifacts. Bronze age tel sites are littered with ceramic pebbles. Every pot eventually becomes a bunch of shards and pebbles that last forever. That said... a material culture that only uses ceramics occasionally wouldn't leave such signs. Also.. you could call a wood or hide bucket "pottery," I think.
    • AlotOfReading 1y ago
      No archaeologist would call hide or wood pottery and ceramics don't turn into pebbles. Occasional ceramic use can be very visible archaeologically if the pottery preserves. It's an inert material in the absence of water, after all. In the presence of water though, it turns into dust rather than pebbles.
      • netcan 1y ago
        >ceramics don't turn into pebbles. Much of the middle east, Greece, etc have many large sites with weathered pottery shards in the shape of pebbles, because pottery shards are flat-ish. Millions of ceramic rocks. In the presence of water... you will find the round, flat ones with a perfect "pebbles shape." This is extremely common where I live. I have an aquarium full of them. The "thing about pottery" is that many cultures made (and broke) a lot of it. Its very obvious in the stratography when a pottery making culture moves in. There will be shards in every handful of earth. Occasional pottery use, like figurines or beads.. are not like that. They're only really found "in situ," graves or something.
  • bjackman 1y ago
    IIUC the easiest way to boil stuff without ceramics is usually in an animal's stomach or intestines. I believe you can also do it in a lined wicker basket. I'm not sure exactly how these things are done but both of them seem much easier to figure out than how to fire a pot! (Requires very high temperature and a good understanding of the material to stop it cracking)
• Youden 1y ago
  In high school science class we boiled water using standard printer paper: fold a sheet into a box, put it on a stand over a bunsen burner, fill it with water, turn up the bunsen burner. Not only does it not burn but it retains more of its structural integrity.
  • p00dles 1y ago
    that is so cool - I mean the fact that this example stuck with you so long is a single of good teaching to me
  • boringg 1y ago
    With direct flame on it? I guess it was removing water molecules slower than it was absorbing water. As long as it was saturated it would be fine. Great experiment.
    • cenamus 1y ago
      There's also a great experiment with a normal baloon, keep a tiny bit of water in it and the you can hold the inflated balloon over a flame as long as the water doesn't boil away
    • recursive 1y ago
      In Boy Scouts, we used to boil water with direct flame on paper cups. It would burn the paper "lip" on the bottom, but not leak.
    • alecmg 1y ago
      the mechanism of it is not that paper is saturated with water, but that while there is water in the container, paper doesn't get hotter than 100C and a bit, not enough to ignite.
  • anon84873628 1y ago
    In Boy Scouts we did it with plastic cups. Not the healthiest material in retrospect :-)
  • b800h 1y ago
• kadoban 1y ago
  Is it me or is it odd that that first paper doesn't seem to cite any source for the misconception they're trying to argue against? I don't see any cites for people who believed that boiling could not happen in fragile containers. So my question would be: how many anthropologists believed that, and when did that stop being a majority belief, if it ever was?
  • poulpy123 1y ago
    Honestly just ask people around you if you can boil water in a plastic or paper bag
    • quietbritishjim 1y ago
      The people around me aren't anthropologists claiming to understand ancient societies.
      • poulpy123 1y ago
        > I don't see any cites for people who believed that boiling could not happen in fragile containers. > The people around me aren't anthropologists claiming to understand ancient societies. Are they people or not? It's a simple and quick experiment to have an idea of what current people think about this fact. You'll not be able to write a scientific paper about it but it will good enough to for a reasonable opinion on the topic.
        • kadoban 1y ago
          The people around me are people, they're not a representative sample of anthropologists though (now or decades ago). That logic just doesn't work.
  • Isamu 1y ago
    It’s common knowledge, less so now because we never need to do it. But go back in time and it’s common frontier knowledge, you can do this in a pinch. And in Medieval times, you can boil something in a pouch. It’s just less reliable, the upper part hanging the bag could burn and you could lose everything. It’s just less durable. So anthropologists are likely to argue about how prevalent it was. Wouldn’t you want to transition to a more durable way as quickly as possible?
• bravesoul2 1y ago
  You can boil things in bamboo too
• clarionbell 1y ago
  From the original paper: > experiments recently demonstrated that organic perishable containers, e.g., made out of deer skin or birch bark, placed directly on a fire, are capable of heating water sufficiently to process food, with the advantages of wet-cooking beginning at lower, sub-boiling temperatures than thus far acknowledged
  • rukuu001 1y ago
    Yep, leather works.
  • sumitkumar 1y ago
    Even thin single use plastic works. The first time I saw it it was surreal.
    • userbinator 1y ago
      The thinner the better --- thermal conductivity is what keeps the temperature from rising too far.
• ethan_smith 1y ago
  Stone boiling (dropping heated rocks into water-filled containers) was also a widespread pre-pottery technique that Neanderthals likely employed alongside the hide/bark methods you mentioned.
  • slow_typist 1y ago
    +1 You can even dig a hole into ground and seal it with clay. It’s a well known survival technique.
    • dh2022 1y ago
      That is like cooking inside a really big pot :)
• stinos 1y ago
  Heh, wanted to make a comment saying this isn't 'super' recent knowlegde because I vividly remember Jean M. Auel using it in her first novels written in the 80's, and basically all the technical stuff she wrote was researched, ony to find out [1] indeed opens with a quote from said novels.
  • pests 1y ago
    I loved those books when I was younger, was randomly thinking about them the other day and couldn’t remember the name for the first book and got lost in Wikipedia
• contrarian1234 1y ago
  I read that the native american peoples that lives in the San Francisco area never invented pottery. They boiled water in tightly woven baskets. Sure you have a 100C heatsink within millimeters, but I still find it surprising that the outside layer of the basket wouldn't burn away slowly.
  • bjornsing 1y ago
    > Sure you have a 100C heatsink within millimeters, but I still find it surprising that the outside layer of the basket wouldn't burn away slowly. Probably because the water slowly permeates through the outside layer of the basket and evaporates there. A lot of energy can be absorbed that way.
    • prometheus76 1y ago
      I'm not sure that's the mechanism at work because I have boiled eggs using plastic cups and also waxed paper cups many times. I don't think any water is boiling through. The cup itself is staying at 100C, which is below its ignition point.
      • LeifCarrotson 1y ago
        The cup isn't exactly 100C, it's being heated by the flame. But it's only a few hundred microns thick, and the back is in direct contact with the 100C water. One side is exposed to an air/methane flame at around 2000C/3500F, which (while very hot) is a poor thermal conductor, and the other side is in contact with the water. The temperature at the interface is somewhere in the middle. Also, you do you, but it's probably not a great idea to boil food in plastic cups or "waxed" (often coated in a styrene compound, not real "wax") paper cups...
      • bjornsing 1y ago
        Over an open flame?
• agumonkey 1y ago
  So the heat transfer through the material to the water "fast" enough so that it doesn't char at all ? Makes sense but still surprising.
  • MPSimmons 1y ago
    Yep. Lots of examples on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xV2gsWHhDhY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xV2gsWHhDhY
    • agumonkey 1y ago
      Very impressive
  • RugnirViking 1y ago
    I wonder if attempts to prevent charring of such a design could be what led to pottery. One can imagine smearing mud or clay on the underside of bark or animal hide pots to increase their longevity. Long enough exposure to high heat and ?
    • agumonkey 1y ago
      yeah probably I also wonder if people tried to layer various material to cook them at different speed, a form of ad-hoc thermal control
• paulnpace 1y ago
  I have wondered if this concept can be applied to some sort of DEW armor.
  • IAmBroom 1y ago
    Well, as long as you're willing to wear (essentially) fishtanks into battle, it might work. One little layer of wet clothes isn't going to do much against Directed Energy Weapons - unless you were just really anxious about condensation.
    • paulnpace 1y ago
      It can't conduct heat to human skin. The concept, in this case, wouldn't be to merely prevent a material from catching fire, but to keep the person from being burned or steam-boiled. However, the general concept could also be applied to protecting things besides people, such as vehicles or buildings. I don't actually know very much about the wavelengths used by DEW, so I'm not clear if water, alone, is a practical as shielding, but could be used as a heat sink, especially when factoring in latent heat of vaporization.
• williamdclt 1y ago
  Getting somewhat off-topic and maybe it's more evident to other people, but for me understanding this energy transfer was eye-opening for my cooking abilities! Like, my mushrooms aren't going to actually cook as I want as long as they render water because the water is cooling the pan down. Obvious in retrospect, never really fully realised it. Also means I can blast the heat up to get rid of this water faster, it's not going to make the pan hotter than 100C while there's a layer of water.
  • bluGill 1y ago
    > Also means I can blast the heat up to get rid of this water faster, it's not going to make the pan hotter than 100C while there's a layer of water. Eventually you boil water off the surface faster than heat can penetrate inside the mushroom and so you can burn the outside while the inside is still wet. How much heat the mushroom can handle before this happens is left as an exercise to the reader.
  • germinalphrase 1y ago
    I’ve heard it said by a very science oriented chef that ‘all cooking is moisture management’.
    • morsch 1y ago
      Dave Arnold?
      • germinalphrase 1y ago
        Can’t find it now - but might have been!
    • rurban 1y ago
      There are several good cooking books for scientists, like https://books.google.com/books/about/Physics_in_the_Kitchen.html?id=3K3YEAAAQBAJ&redir_esc=y https://books.google.com/books/about/Physics_in_the_Kitchen....
  • jghn 1y ago
• chrismcb 1y ago
  Every camper knows you can boil water in a paper cup.
• seiferteric 1y ago
  I would think you would not even have to expose it directly to fire, you could put it on a rock above or near the fire. Also you can of course heat rocks in a fire and put them into water to boil it.
• evilsetg 1y ago
  What would speak against carving a cooking pot from stone? One thing I could find is that they might explode but I guess that would also depend on the type of rock.
• t-3 1y ago
  I find it fascinating that paleo-anthropologists didn't know about using leather or bark pots when those are extensively documented and presumably well-known to recent-ish-history-anthropologists. Is there just very little overlap and communication between the groups?
  • nyeah 1y ago
    Who says they didn't know?
    • t-3 1y ago
      The paper linked by the grandparent claims that archaeologists and paleo-anthropologists believed that it was impossible for humans to boil until the invention of stone-carving and pottery because they thought the containers would burn.
      • nyeah 1y ago
        Thanks, but I don't think that's exactly what it says. It says "Most archaeologists assume that boiling in perishable containers cannot pre-date the appearance of fire-cracked rock (FCR)" "This paper has two principal goals. The first is to alert archaeologists and others to the fact that one can easily and effectively boil in perishable containers made of bark, hide, leaves, even paper and plastic, placed directly on the fire and without using heated stones."
• heikkilevanto 1y ago
  Reminds me of the anecdote of an early fisherman who cast his net, looked at that catch, and concluded that fishes have scales and fins, and are always at least 5cm long.
• dr_dshiv 1y ago
  Pits of grease, with hot rocks—could they have fried food in it?
• xorcist 1y ago
  > the whole of paleo-anthropology "knew" that humans couldn't boil things until the invention of pottery Is that really true? That sounds unlikely when there are so many contemporary counterexamples. If you have an interest in cooking, there are several traditional meals where cooking is done in other ways. Especially so for indigenous people who have little access to metals or clay. For example on Borneo the traditional way to cook rice over fire is inside bamboo stalks. As long as the water doesn't boil off, you can cook in almost any vessel.
  • pinkmuffinere 1y ago
    Ya, I don't believe ```paleo-anthropology "knew" that humans couldn't boil things until the invention of pottery```, it doesn't pass 'the laugh test'. There are many survivalist youtube channels that demo multiple methods to boil water without pottery [1][2]. If I were an anthropologist, I would be looking at modern survivalist methods to get inspiration for 'ancient' habits. Surely the folks that have studied their whole lives have even better sources of inspiration to investigate. Unless we have some source to back it up, I can't see how this remarkable claim should be trusted. [1] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/0zun_UxO2vU https://www.youtube.com/shorts/0zun_UxO2vU [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dj_kUTBM6Qo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dj_kUTBM6Qo
    • josefx 1y ago
      > There are many survivalist youtube channels There is often a knowledge gap between different fields of expertise, someone else already cited medical doctors and psychologists reinventing well known mathematics badly. Also youtube attracts copy cats that use modern tools out of frame, so it isn't a reliable source of information. I can already see the discoveries "Great wall of china most likely build by single man with a stick, just ignore the excavator tracks".
  • zem 1y ago
    yeah I remember learning in school that with sufficiently good heat conduction you could boil water in a paper cup, because the burning point of paper was higher than the boiling point of water.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• testing22321 1y ago
  I boiled water over a fire in a plastic jug once. I was skeptical, but it Worked great. It was a remote hunting trip in the Yukon and my buddy forgot the camp stove & pots.
  • genocidicbunny 1y ago
    When I was a kid, me and friends used plastic bags to boil water for cooking when out in the forest or at a beach on the nearby river. As long as you had enough water in the bag, it worked great (though there were probably some fun chemicals being released from the bag...)
• JackFr 1y ago
  > It turns out that no, you don't need pottery to boil things My middle school science teacher boiled water in a paper cup.
• Orbital_Armada 1y ago
  Your first source does not support your argument that paleo-anthropology believed pottery was required for boiling. Reading just the abstract it's clear that the source is auguring for the appearance of boiling earlier than the common view that fire cracked rocks (that would have been used for boiling by placing in any water container) marked the earliest point of boiling. The Upper Paleolithic mentioned as the first appearance of fire cracked rocks, and thus assumed initial boiling, is ~5,000+ years before the appearance of pottery. Ignoring the reference to pottery the assumption that boiling must require heated rocks is probably incorrect. I think this is a common failure mode of archeology, where evidence is preserved (cracked rocks) is favored despite obvious selection biases.
• 6d6b73 1y ago
  All you need to boil stuff is a skull of an animal.