When 'Everyone' Doesn't Know
Wednesday, July 16, 2025
When I spot an interesting headline at Hacker News, I often save time by taking a look at the comment thread first.
Recently, though, the very first comment on a thread about an archaelogical discovery proved worthwhile on its own.
The paper concerns a site at which the authors claimed evidence of fat rendering activity by Neanderthals.
With the proviso that I am not myself an archaelogist -- but that the commenter gave citations that back him up -- the below comment is worthwhile:
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?(1) An entire field went on making a bad assumption for a long time. But also (2): Hooray for the inductive nature of knowledge, that ultimate corrector of error!
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 Celsius! 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! 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. [lightly edited, footnotes removed, bold added]
One of the references explicitly notes this blind spot and another tests the idea of boiling things in combustible containers.
Another commenter describes a teacher in his high school science class boiling water in a paper container. This means of boiling is not new!
It is unusual to see so many intelligent and educated people failing to make a connection so obvious in retrospect, but it happens.
This all reminds me a little of Chesterton's Fence, which cautions against over-hasty reform.
If one should be careful reforming that which one doesn't fully understand, one should be doubly so of accepting that which one does not fully understand.
-- CAV
3 comments:
"It is unusual to see so many intelligent and educated people failing to make a connection so obvious in retrospect, but it happens."
I'm a paleontologist not an archeologist, but the two fields are adjacent. What usually happens is that no one's working on the question. Rendering fat sounds fascinating, but how often does it come up? How high a priority is this for an archeologist? I'd wager that the vast majority of archeos gave it as much thought as they gave any of the other thousands of things that fall under this umbrella.
Most of us know that you can boil water in a paper cup--it's a standard demonstration of thermodynamics and the use of water as a heat-sink. Plus, it's a fun trick. But without a reason to look for a connection you're probably not going to. If I'm an archeo working on trade routes by examining stone tools, I'm not going to care too much about fat rendering.
What I'm saying, boiled down, is that this over-states the case. The field didn't miss the connection--only a handful did, the rest had no reason to even consider the question.
Yo, Gus, if I remember correctly, Algonquian peoples in the northeastern US would cook liquids in deerskins using heated rocks. The most entertaining (if that's the right word) example I can think of is the Mongolian dish boodog (means "something tied/bound?). Marmots are considered a delicacy (a very greasy delicacy with a very non-delicate taste, and the chitlings are just dang nasty, and also are associated with deaths from plague), but in late summer they've grown so fat from grass that you can't cook them over a fire--they'll explode. So the innards are removed from the carcass and heated stones and vegetables are put inside it and the limbs and belly tied off. As it cooks, you burn the hair off the outside with an acetylene torch. As my father said when I told him about it, "Ah, cooking for REAL men."
Dinwar,
I appreciate the correction, the explanation, and the pun. Thanks!
Snedcat,
Thanks for the examples. IIRC, a couple of Amerindian boiling methods that didn't involve ceramics came up in other comments.
Gus
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