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.

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!

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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 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

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)

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.

>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.

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

> 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.

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.

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

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

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?

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

> 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.

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...)

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

Yep, leather works.

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 ?

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

Who says they didn't know?

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.

At the moment, your comment is being heavily down-voted for what seems to be a totally reasonable point of view.

In recent years we've went from "completely primitive and segregated Neanderthals", to "oh, we share quite a bit of DNA with the Neanderthals", and "the Neanderthals engaged in complex symbolic thought", as well as "the Neanderthals were pretty advanced artists".

The current article is a further demonstration of that trend.

So it's fair to say that our original assumptions of the Neanderthals were profoundly flawed, and, as we go, we discover that they were different to us by a difference of degree -as you propose-, as opposed to the notion of being radically and binarily different.

In that vein, it is not a stretch to imagine that we were perhaps also completely wrong in our assumptions of their ability to communicate by sound, i.e. mastering languages.

Right, it’s not like people born deaf are just completely useless as humans. Just like we have sign language and there is a whole concept of body language alone is enough to show it would be possible for them. We have people like Helen Keller who existed.

In Jean M Auel’s Earths Children books the Neanderthals communicated via hand gestures and vocalizations.

And neanderthalensis was not outcompeted, their genes survived in Homo sapiens until today.

During a period of high trust, I've watched crows training their young via showing.

While crows have "crafty" intelligence, neanderthals would be more apt at this.

But really, the logical first language would be gesture, an extension of already existing body language. And such language is employed by humans when hunting, at war, whenever quiet is preferred.

Even a gesture language of a few dozen concepts is almost automatic, pointing, waving, directional motions, hushing motions, pointing at your head, clapping, etc.

This being extended as full language in beings incapable of complex sound, seems viable.

Deaf homo sapiens sapienses do have perfectly good language skills.

Do you think deaf people can't communicate?

There are many successful ambush hunters in nature. It is not such a bad strategy

That doesn't mean it was used for speech and language: evolution frequently finds a new purpose for a gene, and the previous purpose does not have to be human-comprehensible.

> Neanderthals were certainly smart enough to have more understanding of dietary needs than a vulture does.

Understanding the nutritional value of a food goes beyond than working to get the food. You need to have a theory of nutrition (true or false), and there is nothing that can suggest this. Saying that they ate fat because fat is good for them is tautologic

> And "any homo something before or after" includes us today.

It is obvious that I include our specy only until the first research and experiments on the topic

What more did they know about dietary fat than that it was edible and it would help them survive, the same as any animal?

This just sounds like romanticizing.

My huskies and some of my neighbors have equivalent educations on nutritional science.

? Can you expand? What is the political implication?

What do you mean?

It's interesting to think about, and yes, I would think it's more accurate to consider that homo (sapiens) neanderthalensis are part of what became us, and in that case it seems odd/wrong to talk about them being outcompeted when there was interbreeding and their descendents are still here.

However they are still extinct!

It reminds me of the historical narratives in the UK about Viking settlers. We were taught (in the 80s and 90s) to think of the vikings as an invasive force, who were and remained an alien population, who raised levies from the poor, honest britains, and who eventually left or were overcome or just faded from view or whatever. We tended to then skip to the Norman conquest and not talk about it too much. But it's clear in the narrative that the Vikings are 'them' and the saxons are 'us'.

Only when you look at the actual history, the viking people settled and intermarried, cross-pollinated culturally and religiously and are firmly 'us' (if you're British). As a political force, the Norman conquest put an end to their rule of the northern part of England, but it's not like they suddenly all went 'home' after a couple of hundred years of settling.

I think it's because that 3% number is so small, it actually comes down to "outcompeted". A merger of two equally fit sub-species would result in more DNA persisting.

I am pretty sure most experts in the field would share your assertion that the statement ("neanderthals died out") hides complexity.

Sometimes hiding complexity behind some ballpark statement can be useful tho. I teach media technology — and a useful simplification is to have students think about inputs and outputs in an abstract fasbion first, then we can talk about signal types and levels and maybe impedances. But in reality a mere piece of wire with a shield can get infinitely more complex and fill a whole academic career. It just isn't useful to start talking about it that way unless you like to get rid of students. I tend to mention simplifications when I use them however, something I wish more scientific journalism did.

I've long assumed it's typical patriarchal historical/anthro bullshit. History is memorizing kings and wars; there have to be winners and losers; etc.

Neanderthals especially were probably kinda autistic.

Possibly however homo erectus used the same design for their hand axes for over a million years. This implies the design was hardwired in their brains, in the same way the design of nests are hardwired in bird brains, as opposed to a rationally thought out design.

It doesn't make them not an artist, but it might make them a bad artist. That image gets more nonsensical the more you look at it. How big is that skull in the foreground supposed to be?

Can you link to some of this mind-blowing stuff?