Speaker 1: Hey, you welcome to Stuff to blow your mind. My
Speaker 1: name is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 2: And I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday. We're going into
Speaker 2: the vault for an older episode of the show. This
Speaker 2: one is part one of our series on the cauldron.
Speaker 2: Rather mundane object, but I recall we dug up a
Speaker 2: lot of interesting threads and tangents on this. So this
Speaker 2: episode originally published May twenty fourth, twenty twenty two. Let's
Speaker 2: let's jump right in and land with the splash.
Speaker 1: Round about the cauldron. Go in the poisoned in trails.
Speaker 1: Throw toad that under cold stone days and nights has
Speaker 1: thirty one sweltered venom sleeping got boiled. Now first in
Speaker 1: the charmed pot, double double toil and traple, fire burn
Speaker 1: and cauldron bubble.
Speaker 3: Feel it of a finny snake.
Speaker 4: In the cauldron, boil and bake, I have newt and
Speaker 4: toe of frog, wool of bat and tongue of dog, adders,
Speaker 4: fork and blind worms, sting lizard's leg, And how let's
Speaker 4: wing for a charm of powerful trouble like a hell
Speaker 4: broth boil and bubble, double double toil and trouble, fireburn
Speaker 4: and cauldron Baba Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind
Speaker 4: production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
Speaker 1: is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 3: And I'm Joe McCormick. And rob why did you ask
Speaker 3: me to read from Macbeth in a witchy voice? What
Speaker 3: is that going to lead into?
Speaker 1: Well, of course we're going to be talking about cauldrons,
Speaker 1: and certainly in Western traditions, I feel like one of
Speaker 1: the first places that one's mind goes is to go
Speaker 1: to act for a scene one of William Shakespeare's Macbeth.
Speaker 1: This is the scene that we just read from Round
Speaker 1: about the Cauldron go It's and it does bring together
Speaker 1: a number of the ideas of the cauldron that will
Speaker 1: be discussed in these episodes. And of course it's just
Speaker 1: just a fabulous scene in general, with witches doing their
Speaker 1: their witchy best to make some sort of horrific potion.
Speaker 3: Now, obviously you have had cauldrons on the brain. What
Speaker 3: sent you down this path? How did we end up here?
Speaker 3: You know, I don't remember exactly. It was something that
Speaker 3: came up in previous research for another episode. I started
Speaker 3: noticing the cauldron and I was like, oh, well, there's
Speaker 3: a lot here we should consider coming back to it,
Speaker 3: and indeed there is quite a lot, because on one
Speaker 3: hand you have just the history of mundane but fascinating
Speaker 3: cooking technology, and then you have the different sacred and
Speaker 3: supernatural directions. This goes in as in as well. Certainly
Speaker 3: there's the Asian tradition, which we'll probably get to first,
Speaker 3: but then there's this rich Western tradition going back to
Speaker 3: Celtic traditions and so forth. And some of these are
Speaker 3: perhaps more connected with the Cauldron of Macbeth, and we'll
Speaker 3: probably discuss that in a subsequent episode. But it is
Speaker 3: you need to task usselves, like what do we think
Speaker 3: of when we think of cauldron. I know I instantly think,
Speaker 3: of course, of this scene from Macbeth, but I also
Speaker 3: instantly think back to a trio of early eighties films.
Speaker 3: I think of Beast Master, I think of Conan the Barbarian,
Speaker 3: and I also think of those both from nineteen eighty two,
Speaker 3: but I also think of nineteen eighty one's Clash of
Speaker 3: the Titans. All three of these have some sort of
Speaker 3: a cannibal stew going on, some sort of a big
Speaker 3: broth that it is revealed, has human parts within it.
Speaker 3: Now in the Clash of the Titans. There's an interesting
Speaker 3: connection because the cauldron is being tended by three Crones,
Speaker 3: the gree Sisters, who are part of the story of
Speaker 3: Perseus and Medusa, and it's hard not to notice the
Speaker 3: similarities with the Three Witch Sisters and Macbeth there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's my understanding there is a connection here. These
Speaker 1: are essentially the ancient predecessors of Macbeth's which is now.
Speaker 1: As for the cannibal Stoo's, yeah, I think it's a
Speaker 1: case where I'm just guessing here. We're based on the timeline.
Speaker 1: I think they invoked it and Clash of the Titans,
Speaker 1: and then either overtly or not, the makers of Beast
Speaker 1: Master and Conan were like, oh, we need to get
Speaker 1: in on that. That's a great image. Get a cannibal
Speaker 1: stew in here.
Speaker 3: But if that's the case, why didn't Conan have a
Speaker 3: pet mechanical owl.
Speaker 1: I know, I know it's a flaw. It's often pointed
Speaker 1: out as a flaw of that film.
Speaker 3: Conan needs a robot.
Speaker 1: I think another film that people might think of would
Speaker 1: be the nineteen eighty five Disney film The Black Cauldron,
Speaker 1: based on the work of Lloyd Alexander and this of
Speaker 1: course drew from Welsh mythology, and we'll get into some
Speaker 1: of that in subsequent episodes. But I asked my ten
Speaker 1: year old son what he thought about when I mentioned
Speaker 1: the word cauldron. He has not seen well, he's seen
Speaker 1: Clash of the Titans and loves it, but he hasn't
Speaker 1: seen the other two films. When I ask him, he said, well,
Speaker 1: I think of soup, and I think of Harry Potter,
Speaker 1: the latter of which of course is also linked to
Speaker 1: Western traditions of witches and so forth. And I think
Speaker 1: the Potter books and films are probably a key modern
Speaker 1: pop culture reference regarding cauldron's You.
Speaker 3: Know, I started thinking about something with this word, but
Speaker 3: then started doubting myself. I'll see what you think about this,
Speaker 3: So I don't know if there's already an established term
Speaker 3: for this type of phenomenon. But I was thinking about
Speaker 3: how cauldron is something you might call like a charged
Speaker 3: variant of a concept, a word that has extremely mundane
Speaker 3: literal synonyms, like literally a cauldron is just a large
Speaker 3: pot or a big pot. I think, perhaps one that
Speaker 3: is especially used over an open flame, more so than
Speaker 3: in like an indoor cook top setting and yet the
Speaker 3: word suggests a world of associations that it's literal synonyms
Speaker 3: do not. Like in English, large pot does not have
Speaker 3: any special magic swirling about it, but cauldron does. Anytime
Speaker 3: you say the word cauldron, it suggests, you know, this
Speaker 3: is trollish sorcery, something is going on. But then again,
Speaker 3: maybe it's not that remarkable because I guess you can
Speaker 3: think of other things associated with magic, Like I think
Speaker 3: the word wand literally just means like a rod or
Speaker 3: a stick, but in modern English it is pretty much
Speaker 3: always associated with magic.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, it is interesting to think about this because
Speaker 1: with the cauldron, you could sort of go cauldron, pot,
Speaker 1: crock pot, instant pot, and the closer you get to instant, Like,
Speaker 1: the instant pot does not have really any nefarious or
Speaker 1: magical connotations. It's thoroughly modern, nothing to fear. And I
Speaker 1: feel like though, the further back through the terminology you go, yes,
Speaker 1: the stranger things get because even pot is more intimidating
Speaker 1: than crockpot.
Speaker 3: Well, I wonder if there's generally a thing in languages
Speaker 3: where there's like an archaic synonym for a word that
Speaker 3: loses its mundane associations like one one synonym maintains the
Speaker 3: mundanity through the ages, and the other one only retains
Speaker 3: usage in magically charged scenarios.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean I think that's the case. I'm not
Speaker 1: sure if we're going to end up keeping the third
Speaker 1: witch's bit from the opening here, but there is a
Speaker 1: line in that where the where the witch rhymes children
Speaker 1: with cauldron, children being this old term for like entrails.
Speaker 1: But I didn't do a deep dive into this terminology,
Speaker 1: if it's my understanding like that that was already an
Speaker 1: archaic term when Shakespeare used it, or you know, and
Speaker 1: or a more specified term. But you do what you
Speaker 1: have to do when you need to rhyme something with cauldron.
Speaker 3: Yeah, what else fits in there? Squadron? Not really?
Speaker 1: I mean you can make it work wire which is
Speaker 1: going to be talking about squadrons?
Speaker 3: How about how about how about Godson cauldron?
Speaker 1: That's kind of a maybe maybe I think you got to.
Speaker 3: Put some spin on the pronunciation though that's like an
Speaker 3: M and M style style.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you got to be a pro to make that work.
Speaker 1: So all in all, there is a rich tradition of
Speaker 1: cauldrons overflowing with powers of death, creation, domination, torment, and divination.
Speaker 1: But Before we get into all of this properly, we
Speaker 1: have to back up. We have to really talk about
Speaker 1: the mundane world of cauldrons as well, and so we're
Speaker 1: gonna have to talk about, you know, the origins of
Speaker 1: soup technology, which I've been super excited about all weekend,
Speaker 1: and I think my family is sick of hearing about it.
Speaker 3: You've been talking about soup a lot. Did you make
Speaker 3: soup this.
Speaker 1: No, it's too hot for soup, that's the thing. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean we could have made a spot show, I guess,
Speaker 1: but but no, I haven't been having any soup. But
Speaker 1: just reading about the traditions of soup, it's made me
Speaker 1: respected all the more. I need a cold snap so
Speaker 1: I can get back into it. So first and foremost,
Speaker 1: as we've been discussing, a cauldron is simply a large
Speaker 1: pot used to boil liquid over a fire. So in function,
Speaker 1: it's really no different from any pot you have in
Speaker 1: your kitchen. It's just generally considered a bigger pot. Now,
Speaker 1: long before the advent of metal pots, we had bowls.
Speaker 1: We had pots of pottery, as well as presumably ones
Speaker 1: made of wood and leather, though such artifacts don't always
Speaker 1: stand the test of time here as well. But one
Speaker 1: question that's interesting to get into is, Okay, well, we
Speaker 1: were talking about cauldrons, we're inevitably talking about about soups
Speaker 1: in many cases. But do you need a pot, or
Speaker 1: you need a metal pot, or do you need a
Speaker 1: pot at all in order to make soup? I would
Speaker 1: have thought so, there was a time where I would
Speaker 1: have thought so as well, But it turns out it's
Speaker 1: not necessary because a hole in the ground is nature's cauldron,
Speaker 1: and this is something that can be made water tight
Speaker 1: via the use of animal hides, and then one may
Speaker 1: fill this hole with water and of course food your
Speaker 1: various ingredients, which will of course eventually come together in
Speaker 1: a hot soup. But where's the heat going to come from?
Speaker 3: Good question, Yeah, because you can't put a fire under
Speaker 3: it if it's a hole in the ground and then
Speaker 3: a hide.
Speaker 1: I mean, I guess there might be specialized situations where
Speaker 1: you could depend on geothermal heat, but in this example,
Speaker 1: geothermal heat is not available, so you're going to have
Speaker 1: to create something with fire. The answer is, you have
Speaker 1: an adjacent fire, get it nice and hot, and then
Speaker 1: you have hot stones heated up in that fire, and
Speaker 1: then those hot stones are transferred from the fire to
Speaker 1: the soup, and that is how you heat the soup
Speaker 1: in the hole.
Speaker 3: Nice, Okay, the hot stone goes in, then you got
Speaker 3: a stew gooing.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Now, other perishable above ground bowls and pots apparently
Speaker 1: were also used in different cultures with this technique, which
Speaker 1: is generally referred to as stone boiling. In these cases
Speaker 1: you would often have like a wet bark or hide
Speaker 1: scenario to create the vessel. But stone boiling has been
Speaker 1: traced to pre pottery culinary traditions of Native American tribes,
Speaker 1: Paleolithic Chinese groups, and even Neanderthals. And on a quick
Speaker 1: note about Chinese culture, I know when we talk about
Speaker 1: cooking with stones and cooking soup with stones, you instantly
Speaker 1: think about the story of Stone Soup, which I believe
Speaker 1: in most tellings has no relation to to to stone boiling. However,
Speaker 1: Chinese American author Ying Chang Compostein adapted the classic story
Speaker 1: but with the twist, first of all Chinese twist, setting
Speaker 1: it in ancient China, but also incorporating a stone boiling motif.
Speaker 1: In this book called the Real Story of Stone Soup.
Speaker 3: Well, Rob, I know you said, everybody knows the story,
Speaker 3: but maybe some people don't. What's the quick version of
Speaker 3: the stone soup?
Speaker 1: Well, the classic stone soup says tail is that, you know,
Speaker 1: you have some individual generally there's sort of a you know,
Speaker 1: a roguish type character. There's that a great adaptation of
Speaker 1: this with some additional elements in Jim Henson's The Storyteller series.
Speaker 1: But here's this this man and he's he's cooking up
Speaker 1: some water and he asks somebody passing by, excuse me,
Speaker 1: I'm making some soup. Could you help me? I just
Speaker 1: need a nice stone And they're, you know, like what,
Speaker 1: what do you need a stone for it? And they're like, well,
Speaker 1: I'm making stone soup. And so they agree. They bring
Speaker 1: this individual a stone, and in many cases, you know,
Speaker 1: the the would be chef here sniffs it, maybe licks
Speaker 1: the stone, and it's like, okay, this is a good one.
Speaker 1: Plunks it in and so now now people are begin
Speaker 1: to get interested. Other passer buyers stop and they're like,
Speaker 1: what's he doing. He's cooking stone soup. They ask him, well,
Speaker 1: how does it taste? When he samples it, He's like, well,
Speaker 1: needs a little salt. So he doesn't have salt, but
Speaker 1: somebody is now they're now invested in this process, and
Speaker 1: so someone brings some salt, but then he chases it again. No,
Speaker 1: needs a little pepper, So someone brings some pepper before along.
Speaker 1: Of course, it needs some celery, it needs some potatoes,
Speaker 1: it needs all these other ingredients, and at the end
Speaker 1: of the process there is this great, big bowl of soup.
Speaker 1: And I think in most tellings it is then communally enjoyed.
Speaker 3: Oh well, that's a great story. And to sort of
Speaker 3: an idea about how you can you can like hype
Speaker 3: bootstrap nothing into something.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it's it's a wonderful tail. But but yeah.
Speaker 1: In this adaptation, it takes the stone boiling technique and
Speaker 1: factors it in, which which I found was pretty clever. Now,
Speaker 1: you might wonder what kind of evidence is there for
Speaker 1: stone soup. So, according to a few different sources I
Speaker 1: was looking at, basically it comes down to pits that
Speaker 1: are that are found in the archaeological record that have
Speaker 1: stones in them. Stones that are cracked from heat often
Speaker 1: referred to as thermally cracked rocks. So this is this
Speaker 1: indicates that these rocks were heated to a high temperature
Speaker 1: and then added to this broth or added to water
Speaker 1: to help make this broth. And we also tend to
Speaker 1: see this and pit cooking kind of loop together into
Speaker 1: a combined and earth oven cooking tradition.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, okay, so this wouldn't even necessarily always be
Speaker 3: something like soup. Like I know that there are some
Speaker 3: methods for like roasting meat, I think Mesoamerican culinary traditions
Speaker 3: where you'd like wrap some meat in leaves, like wet
Speaker 3: leaves or something and then cook it in a pit
Speaker 3: in the ground with hot coals.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so I think it does certainly speak to human innovation,
Speaker 1: like the if the hole in the ground is your
Speaker 1: level of cooking technology, it doesn't mean you're not coming
Speaker 1: up with new and ingenious ways to tinker with that format,
Speaker 1: such as as you know, eventually developing a wet cooking technology.
Speaker 3: And I guess we can come back to this in
Speaker 3: a minute, but I think there are real advantages to
Speaker 3: so called wet cooking technologies that they like, they have
Speaker 3: some measurable benefits that some other types of cooking do not.
Speaker 1: Right, I mean, so it obviously wet cooking sticks with us,
Speaker 1: and wet cooking survives the use of stone boiling now
Speaker 1: stone boiling. Yeah, it does eventually lose out to other techniques,
Speaker 1: especially container based cooking with pottery, et cetera, because ultimately
Speaker 1: stone boiling requires more maintenance and it isn't nearly as
Speaker 1: passive a technique. So you know, if you're adding those
Speaker 1: hot stones, then you have to keep adding new hot
Speaker 1: stones taking out the old stones. You can't just well,
Speaker 1: let's put the let's put the soup on, and then
Speaker 1: go do these other things required to present the meal.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, nutrition and taste aside. That's another great thing
Speaker 3: about wet cooking. So if you just like put some
Speaker 3: food items in a pot with water and then let
Speaker 3: it boil, you can just ignore it for a long
Speaker 3: time and it's not going to burn or anything because
Speaker 3: there's enough water content in there that that's going to
Speaker 3: be fine.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So one another source I was looking at, there's
Speaker 1: a paper titled stone boiling, Firecracked Rock and nut Oil
Speaker 1: published in The Wisconsin Archaeologist in two thousand and nine
Speaker 1: by James Skibo, and Skibe points out that the whole
Speaker 1: process of adding and removing hot stones during the production
Speaker 1: of nut oil would have resulted in the loss of
Speaker 1: that precious nut oil that was being produced. So that's
Speaker 1: another thing to think about it. It's like, not only
Speaker 1: is it, you know, not a very passive technique, but
Speaker 1: if you're having to keep you know, reaching in there
Speaker 1: with some sort of implement and removing rocks, adding new rocks,
Speaker 1: you're going to lose some of what you're actually brewing up.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, okay, I can see that, like sticking to
Speaker 3: the rocks and stuff.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but I should also point out though there is
Speaker 1: apparently evidence of stone boiling surviving into the advent of pottery,
Speaker 1: with the stones added to water inside of vessels. So
Speaker 1: and then I also I believe examples of stone boiling
Speaker 1: that is also taking place in some sort of above
Speaker 1: ground scenario, some sort of like say a wet high
Speaker 1: bag or a wet bark container. So there, it didn't
Speaker 1: have to happen in the ground. But I think the
Speaker 1: most certainly to modern are modern understanding of culinary technologies.
Speaker 1: I think the hole in the ground stone boiling scenario
Speaker 1: is perhaps the most amazing and the most removed from
Speaker 1: what we seem to be doing.
Speaker 3: Okay, so we might not know exactly when the first
Speaker 3: human boiled something, but we do have a pretty clear
Speaker 3: picture that wet cooking or boiling, simmering, whatever you want
Speaker 3: to call it, cooking something in water is a technique
Speaker 3: that comes along later in the history of cooking, because
Speaker 3: like fire, goes back a long time before, and pretty
Speaker 3: clearly humans were maybe say, roasting things over an open
Speaker 3: flame before they had wet cooking techniques. So where do
Speaker 3: these wet cooking techniques come from? Do we think?
Speaker 1: Well? I found a source discussing this. This is from
Speaker 1: John D. Speth in When Did Humans Learn to Boil?
Speaker 1: Twenty fifteen, paleo Anthropology Society. I'm going to read a
Speaker 1: quote from this paper. Quote. Pits that would have been
Speaker 1: suitable for stone boiling are equally scarce until the Upper Paleolithic,
Speaker 1: although the evidence for subsurface features of this sort may
Speaker 1: have been obscured or erased by post taphonomic processes. Not surprisingly,
Speaker 1: they're because of the late appearance of heated stones and
Speaker 1: potential boiling pits. Archaeologists almost without exception, have come to
Speaker 1: the logical conclusion that wet cooking is a late addition
Speaker 1: to human culinary practices, another of a long list of
Speaker 1: technological achievements which we owe to the enhanced cognitive powers
Speaker 1: of fully modern humans.
Speaker 3: Okay, so cooking maybe older, but we think wet cooking
Speaker 3: is probably something that comes about in the Upper Paleolithic,
Speaker 3: which I think is generally like between something like fifty thousand,
Speaker 3: like twelve thousand years ago.
Speaker 1: Now, interestingly enough, I think we've pointed this out before,
Speaker 1: but it's still It's one of those facts that I
Speaker 1: think can be very stimulating is that pottery predates agriculture,
Speaker 1: and according to Brian Fagan and Bill Sillar, very little
Speaker 1: of the oldest pottery remains are actually charred by fire,
Speaker 1: suggesting that these were more prestigious items for displaying food
Speaker 1: than for something you would actually use to cook food.
Speaker 1: So while foragers made use of pottery, we also have
Speaker 1: to remember that this was also the pottery is fragile,
Speaker 1: and it's perhaps not ideal for people who are traveling around.
Speaker 1: So this is quite interesting that Fagan and so I
Speaker 1: to bring up here is that the usefulness of pottery,
Speaker 1: paired with its fragility, might have been a contributing factor
Speaker 1: for some groups that had pottery to settle down, Like
Speaker 1: to make full use of the pottery, you might have
Speaker 1: to stop moving around at least a bit and have
Speaker 1: more of a base of operations, where your pottery has
Speaker 1: less chance of becoming fragmented and shattered, and can be
Speaker 1: used to store things as well as present things and
Speaker 1: so forth. Now some of our earliest pottery fragments. It
Speaker 1: depends where you are in the timeline of discoveries. So
Speaker 1: when Fagan and s Silo we're writing this is from
Speaker 1: the seventy Great Inventions of the Ancient World, they were
Speaker 1: pointing to fourteen thousand BCE in Japan as being the
Speaker 1: oldiest oldest known pottery discovery. However, after the publication of
Speaker 1: that book, a twenty twelve paper revealed that Chenrin Cave
Speaker 1: in eastern China was found to contain charred pottery fragments
Speaker 1: dating back twenty thousand years.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I was looking around at these questions about what
Speaker 3: is the earliest evidence of pottery or pots in general,
Speaker 3: And the earliest pots would be pottery, they would be
Speaker 3: ceramics of some kind, fired out of clay or other
Speaker 3: earthen materials, not metal. Metal cooking vessels would come much later,
Speaker 3: So the earliest pottery vessels used for cooking. I was
Speaker 3: looking what's the evidence for that? And I came across
Speaker 3: a paper from twenty thirteen published in Nature by Oliver
Speaker 3: Craig at All called earliest evidence for the use of pottery,
Speaker 3: and I also was looking at a write up of
Speaker 3: this in Science by Sid Perkins called first Evidence of
Speaker 3: Pottery used for Cooking, and at the time this was
Speaker 3: considered some of the earliest direct evidence for pottery used
Speaker 3: explicitly for cooking. And my immediate question was, well, what
Speaker 3: were they cooking in it? Do we have any idea? Actually, yes,
Speaker 3: this paper looks directly into that question what they were
Speaker 3: cooking and helps give us a picture of the way
Speaker 3: of life of the people who use this pottery. So
Speaker 3: the authors of this paper argue that the evidence indicates
Speaker 3: pottery technology emerged in East Asia between twelve thousand and
Speaker 3: twenty thousand years before the present, and it was an
Speaker 3: innovation among hunter gatherers. Rob you mentioned that a minute ago,
Speaker 3: but I think it's worth sitting with that for a minute.
Speaker 3: It's a strange thing. You might assume pottery only arises
Speaker 3: among people who have adopted farming in an agricultural, settled
Speaker 3: way of life that allows them to have fixed homes
Speaker 3: and you know, forges and so forth. This kind of
Speaker 3: industry of creating earthenware vessels would arise from that setting,
Speaker 3: but no, it does appear to arise before people settled
Speaker 3: down and started farming. But this raises the question why
Speaker 3: was pottery invented? We were getting an idea of when
Speaker 3: and where it was invented, but why, what was driving it?
Speaker 3: What was the role it played in people's lives? Well,
Speaker 3: the authors of this paper argue that for the hunter
Speaker 3: gatherers who first started making these pots, and this is
Speaker 3: looking at late place to scene pottery from Japan, a
Speaker 3: total of one hundred and one charred deposits from thirteen
Speaker 3: different sites all over the Japanese islands, and these would
Speaker 3: be pots associated with the Joman culture. The JN. Craig
Speaker 3: and co authors here argue that what would have caused
Speaker 3: people to uptake pottery in this context is if the
Speaker 3: pottery provided people with new ways to process and consume foods.
Speaker 3: This would be the driving technological advantage, But we don't
Speaker 3: know exactly how these earliest pots were used. So this
Speaker 3: study did a chemical analysis on the residue left on
Speaker 3: these charred deposits on pottery from all over prehistoric Japan,
Speaker 3: and one thing worth noting is that many of these
Speaker 3: sites that the pottery shards were recovered from were near
Speaker 3: inland rivers or lakes, and so they were not necessarily
Speaker 3: by the coast. The author's right. We demonstrate that lipids
Speaker 3: can be recovered reliably from charred surface deposits adhering to
Speaker 3: pottery dating from about fifteen thousand to eleven eight hundred
Speaker 3: calibrated years before present, and that's again the incipient Jomon period,
Speaker 3: continuing the oldest pottery so far investigated, and that in
Speaker 3: most cases these organic compounds are unequivocally derived from processing
Speaker 3: fresh water and marine organisms. So at the time of
Speaker 3: the paper, it seemed like some of the earliest pots
Speaker 3: ever used for cooking were being used for cooking seafood,
Speaker 3: though I guess actually I don't know. Is it still
Speaker 3: seafood if it's freshwater fish, I'm not sure.
Speaker 1: Hmm. That's a quandary as well.
Speaker 3: More than three quarters of the charred deposits indicated quote
Speaker 3: high trophic level aquatic food. Now, high trophic level means
Speaker 3: high up the food chain, so primary producers like plants
Speaker 3: are at the bottom, and then you'd have herbivores above them,
Speaker 3: and then you'd have carnivores above them, and then you'd
Speaker 3: have the top carnivores above them. And I assume high
Speaker 3: trophic level aquatic food means they were not only eating seafood,
Speaker 3: they were eating aquatic carnivores. The paper draws attention to
Speaker 3: the possibility that a lot of this was salmon, That
Speaker 3: these pots have fatty acids left by prehistoric cooking of
Speaker 3: salmon which travel upstream for spawning, which could explain these
Speaker 3: the these highly nutritious seafoods near these inland lakes and rivers,
Speaker 3: not necessarily by the shore.
Speaker 1: That's fascinating, because, yeah, the first place in my mind
Speaker 1: went was, okay, perhaps boiling some sort of crustaceans and
Speaker 1: so forth, because sometimes that's that's the best way to
Speaker 1: get at these organisms and turn them into something you
Speaker 1: can you can eat. But salmon it makes sense as well,
Speaker 1: especially if you're imagining a scenario where it's like the
Speaker 1: spawning situation and you have sort of a sudden glut
Speaker 1: of salmon at your disposal. What are you going to
Speaker 1: do with them?
Speaker 3: Yeah, and these people were apparently massively successful at exploiting
Speaker 3: the food resources available at the water's edge. I've read
Speaker 3: multiple sources, alluding to the idea that apparently just prehistoric
Speaker 3: Japan was a great place to be a hunter gatherer.
Speaker 3: There were just a lot of available food resources in
Speaker 3: the natural environment. Then you could you could create a
Speaker 3: lot of calories for your society without having to farm.
Speaker 3: But I also want to discuss a few notes on
Speaker 3: what this type of pottery was. So again, this would
Speaker 3: have been the incipient Joman culture. The Joemon people actually
Speaker 3: get their archaeological reference name from from a descriptor of
Speaker 3: their pottery. Joeman means something something having to do with
Speaker 3: the idea of ropes, and so the pottery they made
Speaker 3: is noted for having decorations where while the clay was
Speaker 3: still wet, impressions were made in the clay with ropes.
Speaker 3: So if you look up Joemon pottery, you'll see all
Speaker 3: these kind of strange looking fiber textures on the outside
Speaker 3: of it. So I guess they would press ropes into
Speaker 3: it and then they would fire it to set the
Speaker 3: textures in the clay. But there are some other very
Speaker 3: notable characteristics of these early pots. First of all, they
Speaker 3: tend to be very small, and second they have round bottoms.
Speaker 3: Rabbi attached a picture of one of these round bottom
Speaker 3: pots for you to look at, and it sort of
Speaker 3: goes against what you would assume about nearly any pot
Speaker 3: you would come across today. What's the bottom of a
Speaker 3: pot got to be? Like it needs to be flat
Speaker 3: so it can sit on a table or on the floor, right,
Speaker 3: h yeah, yeah, these are not flat. You could not
Speaker 3: sit these on a table. They would roll over, can't
Speaker 3: stand up by itself on a flat surface. That's kind
Speaker 3: of odd and it makes you think about, well, wait
Speaker 3: a minute, then, how were they using these pots? Later?
Speaker 3: Jomon pottery shows increases in size, so bigger pots, and
Speaker 3: they tend to innovate a flat bottom, So it seems
Speaker 3: like the later pots would have been able to stand
Speaker 3: on a table or on the ground these earlier pots
Speaker 3: know and this has been interpreted as an evolution of
Speaker 3: the context in which the pottery was primarily used. So
Speaker 3: perhaps the earliest use of these pots was exclusively for
Speaker 3: cooking by hunter gatherers, and the round bottom could be
Speaker 3: the kind of thing that you would settle into the
Speaker 3: coals of a fire. Save a fire burning round bottom
Speaker 3: you just kind of push it down into all the
Speaker 3: stuff that's burning and it'll sit up by itself that way.
Speaker 1: And I wonder, and this is a question I don't
Speaker 1: know the answer to, dangerous question to ask. I wonder
Speaker 1: if the small size of the bowls has to do
Speaker 1: with the fact that if the smaller the vessel, the
Speaker 1: quicker the cook time for the contents, and therefore you're
Speaker 1: maybe risking the cracking of the bowl by the heat
Speaker 1: a little less, because that ends up being I think,
Speaker 1: one of the factors in eventually moving on to metal
Speaker 1: based cooking technologies, as you don't have to really worry
Speaker 1: about them cracking the way you would have to worry
Speaker 1: about high temperature cracks and pottery.
Speaker 3: That's an interesting idea. I don't know. I didn't read
Speaker 3: anything about that, but that seems possible to me. One
Speaker 3: thing I did read is simply that the smaller size
Speaker 3: of these earliest cooking pots has to do with the
Speaker 3: nomadic lifestyle of the people who probably use them. If
Speaker 3: you're like moving around a lot and you need to
Speaker 3: take a pot from one place to another, obviously it's
Speaker 3: better for that pot to be smaller. It's less likely
Speaker 3: it's going to be easier to move, less likely to break.
Speaker 3: And it seems again like the pots got larger and
Speaker 3: had flatter bottoms once people started switching more to an
Speaker 3: agricultural lifestyle.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean otherwise, like, how many flat surfaces are
Speaker 1: you really dealing with? Certainly and certainly not within the
Speaker 1: context of the campfire.
Speaker 3: I don't know if that's the right answer, because the
Speaker 3: other thing is like, you could also have a flat
Speaker 3: bottomed pot that could sit in the campfire. So there's
Speaker 3: no reason I can think of why to use them
Speaker 3: in a fire. The bottom would have to be round
Speaker 3: like that. I don't know if there is a reason
Speaker 3: anybody's aware of that they would have to be round
Speaker 3: like this. I just think it's funny that these earliest
Speaker 3: pots wouldn't stand up by themselves unless maybe they were
Speaker 3: used with some kind of stand Maybe they know, people
Speaker 3: built things that didn't survive as much, like a holder
Speaker 3: of some kind.
Speaker 1: Yeah, or also it could have to do I'm guessing here,
Speaker 1: what with making it more durable and pack for people
Speaker 1: on the move, you know, thinking roughly about against like
Speaker 1: if you're going to, if you're going to, you know,
Speaker 1: create the walls of a castle to withstand battering rams
Speaker 1: and so forth. You don't want you don't want a
Speaker 1: sharp right angle. You want to have a smooth, rounded corner.
Speaker 1: So I don't know, I don't know if that has
Speaker 1: anything to do with the design of these pots or not.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, the bottom does kind of look like an egg.
Speaker 3: Eggs or eggs are good design, right yeah, yeah, Oh,
Speaker 3: but I guess we should talk for a minute again
Speaker 3: about like, what what is the benefit of a pot
Speaker 3: for cooking? Pot is not the only way to cook
Speaker 3: you can. So let's say you catch the salmon in
Speaker 3: the river and oh boy, you know delicious, you know,
Speaker 3: nice fatty meat. It's great. You could put it on
Speaker 3: a big old stick and just roast it over then
Speaker 3: open flame. What kind of advantage does cooking it in
Speaker 3: a pot with water bring?
Speaker 1: Well, One important factor that is brought up in the
Speaker 1: literature is that boiling allows for faster and more thorough
Speaker 1: cooking of ingredients, and it also creates a tasty broth.
Speaker 1: Later on, this is also going to be important with starches.
Speaker 1: Starches are going to thicken up everything, so boiling is
Speaker 1: vital to subsequent traditions of rice, ultimately noodles and so
Speaker 1: much more.
Speaker 3: Right, But boiling also I would say, helps keep maximum
Speaker 3: nutrition available to eat because it all stays in the
Speaker 3: pot when you're boiling, or I mean, I guess some
Speaker 3: gets out. There's some splatter and lost through steam and
Speaker 3: all that, but it's minimal. When you're cooking over an
Speaker 3: open fire, you just think about a lot of nutrition
Speaker 3: is probably dripping right off of your food, and that's
Speaker 3: precious food energy that's just sizzling in the fire down below.
Speaker 3: In a soup, everything stays in the pot. It all
Speaker 3: becomes part of a nutritious broth and you can have
Speaker 3: every last drop.
Speaker 1: Oh, this reminds me of it. We didn't have episode
Speaker 1: of the show where we talked about what gravy A
Speaker 1: bit gravy. Yeah, gravy is essentially the legacy of meat
Speaker 1: drippings and so forth, the precious drippings.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, we were talking. I don't remember the name
Speaker 3: of the people, but they were a group that lived
Speaker 3: in the region that is today Finland, and these people
Speaker 3: had some religious traditions, like of like rituals involving cooking
Speaker 3: bear meat and the gravy made from the bear.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. And then of course we get into this
Speaker 1: a little bit in the Invention episode on Ketchup, where
Speaker 1: you're also dealing with kind of the dripping based condiment
Speaker 1: that is then used as a way to transform other dishes.
Speaker 1: I believe also with boiling, there's an advantage in just
Speaker 1: how you're heating, say a chunk of fish, right like
Speaker 1: the way that the heat is applied to the flesh.
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, I guess that's true. I mean, you certainly
Speaker 3: can boil foods until they're very overdone to his person
Speaker 3: with sensitive taste. But it's harder to burn foods if
Speaker 3: you're boiling them in water. They will just continue to leach.
Speaker 3: I mean, the meat that gets boiled may become very
Speaker 3: tough and lose a lot of flavor, but the flavor
Speaker 3: is getting lost again into the broth, which you can
Speaker 3: drink right now.
Speaker 1: There were certainly, you do see mentioned in the literature
Speaker 1: of quote unquote ceramic cauldrons, which were simply larger ceramic
Speaker 1: pots that could be used over an open fire. But
Speaker 1: of course there are material limits. Even with modern ceramics,
Speaker 1: it can warp and crack in ways that metal does not.
Speaker 1: But of course we didn't just go straight from pottery
Speaker 1: to cast iron cauldrons. There's this whole metallurgical evolution involving copper, bronze, brass, gold,
Speaker 1: and silver. I think we've discussed the broad dates on
Speaker 1: these innovations before, but in the Old world it tends
Speaker 1: to go like copper eighth millennium BCE, copper smelting by six,
Speaker 1: bronze by the third, and brass by the final centuries.
Speaker 1: B wrought iron by the third millennium BCE, cast iron
Speaker 1: in the ninth century BCE. He treated steel in crucible
Speaker 1: steel during the first millennium BCE.
Speaker 3: I gotta say that's a great luxury of the modern era.
Speaker 3: I appreciate being able to cook in steel vessels or
Speaker 3: metal vessels generally, and not having to try to cook
Speaker 3: in earthenware pots. Now this is sort of tangential to
Speaker 3: the subject, but when I think about soup, I necessarily
Speaker 3: think about seasoning, you know, casting all your little spells
Speaker 3: of flavor on the cauldron as it bubbles. And so
Speaker 3: I did want to mention briefly that I came across
Speaker 3: a paper about early evidence for the use of spices
Speaker 3: in cooking, wet cooking, soup, cooking in clay pottery. There
Speaker 3: was a paper published called Phytoliths in Pottery Reveal the
Speaker 3: use of spice in European prehistoric culture. This was by
Speaker 3: Hailey Soall at All published in Plus one in August
Speaker 3: twenty thirteen. And this study actually did analysis of what
Speaker 3: are called phyto that literally means plant rocks or plant stones,
Speaker 3: which are these tiny mineral structures that you can find
Speaker 3: inside plants, which are made out generally out of silica
Speaker 3: that is taken up from the soil. Minerals get taken
Speaker 3: up from the roots into the plant's tissues and creates
Speaker 3: these little mineral deposits. And these mineral deposits can of
Speaker 3: course survive for a long time and can tell you
Speaker 3: things about ancient plants. So in this paper they looked
Speaker 3: at phytoliths that were left behind in what they call
Speaker 3: carbonized food deposits on prehistoric pottery. I think these would
Speaker 3: be kind of like the charred patches that we were
Speaker 3: looking at in that other paper. They say these are
Speaker 3: from quote, the Western Baltic dating from six thousand, one
Speaker 3: hundred calibrated years before present to five seven hundred and
Speaker 3: fifty before present. Now, these clay cooking pots were found
Speaker 3: at the Neolithic sites in I believe modern day Denmark
Speaker 3: and Germany. And so they analyze the fytoliths in these
Speaker 3: pots to determine what these prehistoric people were seasoning their
Speaker 3: food with, and they found out that it was a
Speaker 3: modern garlic mustard seed. I didn't know those terms could
Speaker 3: be combined that way, but modern garlic mustard seed or
Speaker 3: Aliaria petiolata. They write, quote as this seed has a
Speaker 3: strong flavor, little nutritional value, and the fidalists are found
Speaker 3: in pots along with terrestrial and marine animal residues. These
Speaker 3: findings are the first direct evidence for the spicing of
Speaker 3: food in European prehistoric cuisine.
Speaker 1: Wow, that's incredible.
Speaker 3: They also say that this suggests a much greater antiquity
Speaker 3: for the spicing of foods than you can tell from
Speaker 3: any other previous physical records. So that's pretty impressive to me,
Speaker 3: because again, these are people probably from before the age
Speaker 3: of agriculture, or if they are practicing agriculture, it's early
Speaker 3: sort of proto agricultures. You have either hunter gatherers or
Speaker 3: early farmers putting putting spices into their food because they
Speaker 3: just got to have more flavor.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I mean it makes sense, right, I mean,
Speaker 1: you're by necessity, you have to figure out what in
Speaker 1: your surrounding environment is useful as food. Also what has
Speaker 1: some sort of medicinal property or some other property that's
Speaker 1: worth knowing, that's even some poisonous property. And then you
Speaker 1: get into this area, well, okay, this is this is
Speaker 1: maybe a little too potent to be consumed outright, but
Speaker 1: of course it can be added to food, and we
Speaker 1: can add it to this broth that we're preparing. This
Speaker 1: reminds me too of how in Chinese traditions it's often
Speaker 1: described that like the earliest tea traditions were not that
Speaker 1: we're not necessarily the consumption of tea as a drink
Speaker 1: the way we think of it now, but more as
Speaker 1: a soup, as this thing that is prepared thusly. So
Speaker 1: this ties in with so much we're going to be
Speaker 1: discussing about, like what what is the cauldron? What is
Speaker 1: the bowl of heated liquid? It is a place of transfer.
Speaker 1: It can take, you know, that which is inedible and
Speaker 1: make it edible. It can take it can combine elements
Speaker 1: and create something entirely new out of them. And this
Speaker 1: transformative nature of the cauldron is key to these these various,
Speaker 1: even far flung traditions that involve the supernatural in the divine.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, so we're coming back with cauldrons, right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So we're going to be back in the next
Speaker 1: episode talking about cauldron traditions, particularly in Chinese mythology. Chinese traditions,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of wonderful stuff in there that gets
Speaker 1: gets very divine but also highly infernal.
Speaker 3: Love an evil cauldron.
Speaker 1: Yeah, all right, so we'll be back in the next episode,
Speaker 1: but we'd love to hear from everyone out there. What
Speaker 1: are your thoughts about soup and soup cooking technology. I
Speaker 1: know that some of you out there have have written
Speaker 1: in about various sort of older, you know, ancient practice
Speaker 1: that have been either revitalized or just you know, just
Speaker 1: explored as an exercise. So I would be very interested
Speaker 1: if anyone out there has done any any stone boiling
Speaker 1: and if you have any tidbits you'd like to share
Speaker 1: about that experience, because I find the whole process fascinating,
Speaker 1: So right in with any of that. In the meantime,
Speaker 1: if you want to check out other episodes of Stuff
Speaker 1: to Blow Your Mind, the core episodes published Tuesdays and Thursdays,
Speaker 1: and the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed On Mondays,
Speaker 1: we usually do listener mail. On Wednesdays, we usually do
Speaker 1: an artifact or a monster Fact episode that's a short
Speaker 1: form episode, and then on Fridays we set aside most
Speaker 1: serious concerns and just talk about a weird film on
Speaker 1: Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 3: Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth
Speaker 3: Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch
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Speaker 3: to suggest a topic for the future, or just to
Speaker 3: say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff
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