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Comment by jbotz | Hacker News Reader

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?

This led me down a bit of a rabbit-hole. It turns out that no, you don't need pottery to boil things, because you can do it just fine in combustible materials like animal hide or birch bark... so long as you keep the water level consistently high enough, because then the container material will never get hotter than 100 degrees Celcius! So that's kind of obvious once you think about it, but what's interesting about this is that nobody ever considered it until just recently and the whole of paleo-anthropology "knew" that humans couldn't boil things until the invention of pottery![1] To me this is a particularly interesting and surprising example of how, in scientific disciplines, bad assumptions can stick around unquestioned even though from the perspective of physics it's quite obvious that they're bad assumptions.

Edit: add reference to some experimental verification[2].

[1] https://paleoanthro.org/media/journal/content/PA20150054.pdf

[2] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12520-023-01843-z

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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.

that is so cool - I mean the fact that this example stuck with you so long is a single of good teaching to me

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.

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

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.

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.

In Boy Scouts we did it with plastic cups. Not the healthiest material in retrospect :-)

When was this - are we saying that high school science teachers were aware of a fact that was not acknowledged by historians and anthropologists? Quite interesting!

You might be entertained to learn that this happens _all the time_. The spearpoint of application is often a _long way_ from the theory. So much so that they can miss obvious things.

https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/9602/rediscover...

(Dont' skip the comments)

Sometimes to hilarious results:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7677819/

It's not uncommon for experts in one domain to be completely clueless in other domains...

It's a classic survival tip when lost in the wild:

Fold your map into a box and cook whatever food-like things you've found before eating.

Why you're lost when you have a map is a different question.

Just because you have a map doesn’t mean you know where you are in said map. Reading the landscape and elevation changes around you and matching that to a map is a skill into itself. Even harder without a compass.

Could also be the case that in reading the map you realize you're too far in any direction for help...

Or your poor map reading skills are how you got lost in the first place

Even if you had a map, a compass, knew where you are on the map, and had a target destination on the map… it would still be hard to navigate, again a skill all by itself.

Someone who doesn't know how a map works, likely won't have much other survival skill giving him benefit from the map cooking method.

Personally, destroying my only map (or risking it) would be the last desperate method that I would consider trying.

Survival tip number one is btw not bother much with foraging or trying to boil potential poisonous plants to mess up your stomach, but find the best direction and focus on walking, if no help will come.

(One can go without food for days, but not without water)

Wait you mean there isn't an arrow on the map that automatically shows your position and heading?

Why you are even more lost after eating from the map is obvious, though... :)

We used to do this on the camp fire in Boy Scouts with paper cups. The older boys would learn it in science class and would use it to wow the younger ones.

My middle school science teacher did it, and the big caveat he gave us was not to use wax or plastic-coated cups if we wanted to try at home.

I'm very confused how you make a watertight box with a sheet of standard printer paper - would seem like either it would very quickly be a wet mess, or you'd have to fold it so many times to have any durability that it would be too small to contain a meaningful amount of water.

Back in our school days, well before personal phones and all that, we'd often make folded paper water bombs,

eg: https://www.google.com/search?q=origami+water+bomb

returns maker videos, text instructions, etc.

paper water bombs worked very well!

> 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.

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

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dj_kUTBM6Qo

> 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".

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.

I'm also surprised that no one would have thought to use a stone crucible before pottery, or some sort of concave piece of stone

Or cooked something in a natural hot spring or natural outlet where boiling/near-boiling water forces its way to the surface.

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.

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

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.

>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.

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.

>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.

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)

You can also use a plastic bottle or even a paper drinking cup.

Neanderthals were practically swimming in those.

You 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.

Or a big leaf of the right plant, trussed up into a sack with grass.

Notice 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.

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.

+1 You can even dig a hole into ground and seal it with clay. It’s a well known survival technique.

That is like cooking inside a really big pot :)

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.

> 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.

I’ve heard it said by a very science oriented chef that ‘all cooking is moisture management’.

Dave Arnold?

Can’t find it now - but might have been!

There are several good cooking books for scientists, like https://books.google.com/books/about/Physics_in_the_Kitchen....

this is also why cooking advice shifted from "don't wash mushrooms" to "wash mushrooms". If you're cooking your mushrooms properly you'll boil off all the water anyways, so it doesn't matter. It's only if you *don't* cook your mushrooms properly that washing mushrooms makes everything more watery than you'd like.

I don’t wash mushroom because that makes them slimy, making them much more annoying to cut (and also it takes more time than not doing it). I can take a little dirt!

Hopefully it's just dirt!

I was an avid non-washer until experts like Kenji [1] started weighing in. You definitely have to hold off washing them until the last moment to avoid sliminess. Although I don't find the time added to be all that consequential in the grand scheme of things. Obviously you're correct that it'd be *more* time, however.

[1] https://www.seriouseats.com/how-to-clean-and-chop-mushrooms

It's a common mistake. Just this weekend I followed a recipe from a well known cooking website for beef stroganoff that said to brown the beef in batches together with batches of onion. That's not a good idea, the onion will release liquid which prevents the beef from browning and once that cooks off the heat required to brown the meat will burn the onion. So I cooked the beef and onion separately instead. The onion can easily be cooked in one big batch, and if you take care not to burn the fond built up by the beef you can deglaze it with the onion. It's a good way to add extra flavor to the finished dish.

I also had a discussion with a roommate once, he criticized my way of cooking pasta. I keep it just barely boiling, but he insisted I should crank it up to max. I explained that it doesn't matter, the water won't get any hotter. I'll just waste electricity making steam. He didn't believe me so I got a thermometer and proved it.

If you want liquid water to go above 100C you need a pressure cooker.

I cook pasta at a rolling boil not because it cooks faster but the agitation of the boiling makes it less likely to form sticky clumps.

I've thought about that but it's not a problem for me. I throw the pasta in, give it a stir, then leave it until the timer rings. Never have any sticky clumps.

I’ve always used the rolling boil for stirring when making macaroni or other noodles. Maybe a minute of agitation in the beginning to get it going but it lets me set and forget. Maybe add a teaspoon or two of an oil to knock any bubbles out to avoid spill over / foam.

A single good stir at 1-2min of cooking is enough to avoid all sticking (although I still do it a couple more time just in case tbh, the stirring feel tells me how close to cooked they are anyway)

I watched a cook (America’s Test Kitchen?) where they explored different ways of thinking of heat management in pasta. The unbelievable one that worked: boil water, add pasta, turn off heat. The water retains the heat and will still penetrate the pasta. I have never actually tried it myself, but it makes sense.

It's not really that unbelievable. The pasta just has to be in hot water, whether it's 99.9C or 95C doesn't make much of a difference. I use this technique to boil eggs - boil water, turn off heat, add eggs. It seems to help avoid cracked eggs.

I also hadn't thought to boil pasta that way though.

eggs in cold water, bring to boil, boil for 3 mins, remove from heat. never cracks, eggs never overcook no matter how long until you remove them from the water.

FWIW, I boil my eggs in steam: 5mm-1cm of water in the pot, put the egg in, put the lid on it, heat it up until the water starts boiling, and then turn it off, and wait, the steam will continue boiling the egg, and the residual heat will continue producing steam for a while.

I think about these things every time I cook, but it never occurred to me to just try it. I always assumed that the "reaction rate doubles for 10C change" rule of thumb meant it would take much longer, plus presumably cooking is endothermic.

You can also steep dry pasta in room temperature water to prepare it.

Now this one is pushing the limit for me. Surely my ancestors would have realized this is more fuel efficient than boiling water the entire time.

I now want to give this a try, but am pretty skeptical of the outcome.

Or some salt

> I explained that it doesn't matter, the water won't get any hotter. I'll just waste electricity making steam. He didn't believe me

I think we had the same roommate. I used to call him Captain Humidity because he filled the kitchen with steam.

That's hilarious. Reminds me of another person in my life who just burns everything. I keep telling her to calm down with the heat and she keeps putting her induction top on boost then just going to do something else while things burn. She goes through teflon(or whatever they replaced it with) frying pans on a monthly basis, she has like 4 of them right now and they're all flaking off because she overheats them. Like properly destroyed. All her plastic utensils are messed up, molten and broken because she just leaves them on these 1000 degree frying pans.

I tried buying a carbon steel pan for her thinking it can take the heat but after a month it was rusty and caked with carbonized food that she never took the time to scrub off. In hindsight a stainless steel pan would probably have been better but I'm sure she would have found a way to destroy that too.

Shower cartridges can be adjusted to trim back the maximum hot setting. Maybe stoves should have that feature.

Speaking of layer of water, the liedenfrost effect creates some rather spectacular demonstrations, to say the least. [1] That video is real.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6h7dt0bG8XU

That was upsetting. Huge difference between theory and practice when it comes to keeping a usable hand.

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?

Honestly just ask people around you if you can boil water in a plastic or paper bag

The people around me aren't anthropologists claiming to understand ancient societies.

> 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.

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.

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?

> Wouldn’t you want to transition to a more durable way as quickly as possible?

But what is durable? Pottery is fragile itself, and can break if you heat it too fast. I have not used either pottery or baskets on a fire so I can't comment myself, but I see no reason to think pottery is better. It probably depends partially on the society, if you are nomad hunter-gathers, pottery is heavy and breaks too easily, while farmers can just leave the pottery by where they cook and so it may be better.

I think mobility is a good shout. Especially large pottery is relatively hard to transport before you have pack-animals or carts.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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...

Over an open flame?

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

Yep, leather works.

Even thin single use plastic works. The first time I saw it it was surreal.

The thinner the better --- thermal conductivity is what keeps the temperature from rising too far.

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.

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.

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...)

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.

Yep. Lots of examples on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xV2gsWHhDhY

Very impressive

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 ?

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

> It turns out that no, you don't need pottery to boil things

My middle school science teacher boiled water in a paper cup.

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?

Who says they didn't know?

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.

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."

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.

I have wondered if this concept can be applied to some sort of DEW armor.

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.

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.

Pits of grease, with hot rocks—could they have fried food in it?

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.

Every camper knows you can boil water in a paper cup.

All you need to boil stuff is a skull of an animal.

You can boil things in bamboo too

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