4 ms·
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 appa
by 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 agoNo 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 agoIIUC 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)
- prometheus76 1y agoYou can also use a plastic bottle or even a paper drinking cup.
- toast0 1y agoNeanderthals were practically swimming in those.
- dragonwriter 1y agoYou have to invent a whole lot more to have a plastic bottle or even a paper drinking cup, at that point, it'd be simpler to just invent pottery, instead.
- mapt 1y agoOr a big leaf of the right plant, trussed up into a sack with grass.
- bluGill 1y agoNotice that all of your proposed pots will biodegrade in a few decades (centuries in the best case) thus leaving no evidence behind. There are many options, and we can easily test to show many of them work. However there is no way to know which method(s) they used.