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Comment by readthenotes1 | Hacker News Reader

Earlier today there was an article about neanderthal's rendering fat.

The comments pointed out that anthropologist did not know that boiling was possible before the invention of pottery. Another comment pointed out that science teachers knew that it was possible because that was something they would do in class.

Final comment was about how people ReDiscover things in different fields - - like the trapezoidal rule for integration being discovered by someone studying glucose.

This is just yet another example of how bringing expertise from a different area can help.

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The aforementioned trapezoidal rule (Tai's method): https://diabetesjournals.org/care/article/17/2/152/17985/A-M...

I haven't read that thread, but I don't believe that anthropologists thought boiling was impossible before the invention of pottery. Here's one youtube video that demos a method for survival scenarios, I'm sure there are many others: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/0zun_UxO2vU. I know I don't have the context, but unless there are sources for the remarkable claim, it just doesn't make sense. It doesn't pass "the laugh test"

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adv1257 "Underlining earlier work by Speth (61), 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 (62)." Reference 61 goes to this 2015 paper: https://scholar.google.com/scholar_lookup?title=When+did+hum... "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."

Thanks for the link! Not to be argumentative, but I do want to highlight a couple points that I think may be the root misunderstanding:

1. The 2015 paper doesn’t indicate that it was unknown that you can boil water without pottery. It is meant to alert people to an already known fact. Maybe silly, but I do think there’s a distinction here — it’s not that the pinnacle of human knowledge was missing this, it’s that common sense was missing it. I’d compare this to the article “things SDEs assume about names”. Edit: then again, playing devils advocate against myself, the first paper does say “…sub-boiling temperatures than _thus far acknowledged_” (emphasis mine), which would seem to indicate that this was more than just a common misunderstanding.

2. The 2015 paper is not about boiling water in general, it’s about boiling it in a specific way. (Whereas the initial discussion was about boiling water by any method)

I know right? If I, as a yokel kid knew this, it astonishes me people like that wouldn’t know it

Oh no, did he drink that murky mudwater?! I get it if my life depended on it, but for a demonstration video?! I gagged.

If only there were some sort of expert in everything that we could ask, it could pull expertise from all various sciences into one response. I think everyone just needs to start using LLMs.

By the way, for anyone down voting, ask o3 if humans could render fat before they had pottery. It takes seconds to find the answer.

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