Clever things from the past

bread always gets me seeing as it's been around for such a long time.
yea the ingredients etc are basic but it's not something you would expect someone to stumble upon by accident

The history of bread goes back at least 30,000 years.
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v0n said:
is this mystery hour on LBC? Here's another "out there" question, someone mentioned potatoes. If potatoes were brought to Europe by Spanish conquistadors only in second half of the 16th century, rice began spreading across the continent only at the start of 16th century, and so was cabbage, carrots and salads, then WTF did British and Irish eat with their lunch meat for the previous few millennia?
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Porridge?
Corn?

Iirc during the famine times in Ireland, the potato crop failed several years in a row. The farmers rented land from the governing landlords, and as such planted two crops, one of potatoes to eat, and one to pay the rent, be it corn or flax or whatever.

Prior to plantation outside of the settlements the Irish were a tribal roaming people who followed the wild deer and such like. So they ate what the could and didn't plant much.
 
arknor said:
bread always gets me seeing as it's been around for such a long time.
yea the ingredients etc are basic but it's not something you would expect someone to stumble upon by accident
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From some farming history programme, mix flour and water and leave out in the garden to collect plant yeast, I reckon they discovered that fairly early on.
 
v0n said:
is this mystery hour on LBC? Here's another "out there" question, someone mentioned potatoes. If potatoes were brought to Europe by Spanish conquistadors only in second half of the 16th century, rice began spreading across the continent only at the start of 16th century, and so was cabbage, carrots and salads, then WTF did British and Irish eat with their lunch meat for the previous few millennia?
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Grains and root vegetables, mainly.

It might seem odd now to have meat and porridge together, but it was commonplace in the past, e.g.

http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/foc/FoC132small.html

That describes how to make furmenty (there are numerous spellings of that), which is a form of porridge popular in medieval England (and probably elsewhere too). Note that it's recommended to serve it with venison or mutton.

Porridge probably goes back as far as the first pots that could be used to boil stuff in and people probably had it with meat from the start.
 
arknor said:
bread always gets me seeing as it's been around for such a long time.
yea the ingredients etc are basic but it's not something you would expect someone to stumble upon by accident
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I think it is, just not in one step.

The starting point for bread is ground grain, i.e. flour. I think that could occur unintentionally with some stored grain - the bottom layer might be ground against the stone floor by the weight of the grain above it. Or maybe it was done deliberately. Maybe they thought grains were like nuts - if you break open the hard outer shell you get to the edible interior. Or maybe it was curiousity - no end of stuff has started with someone thinking "what happens if".

However it happened, someone had a coarse powder of grain and wanted a use for it rather than wasting it. It's still food, but coarse powder isn't much good for eating. Mixing it with water to make a paste would be a plausible step because that process would have been known for other things such as making mud bricks for building. So now they'd have a flour paste. Not very appetising. They'd be very familiar with the idea that many forms of food are much more appealing when cooked. So they might try cooking it...which would get them unleavened bread. Good eating. Good enough for people to start making it deliberately.

Yeast occurs naturally. Leave the flour paste out for a while and you might end up with enough yeast in it to leaven the bread. It would look strange to those ancient people who'd never seen leavened bread, but sooner or later someone would try eating it anyway from either hunger or curiosity.
 
Hikari Kisugi said:
Wow, interesting indeed, that colonisation really did change the world. We did have wheat or oats or si ilar crops did we not?
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Yes. Various cereals have been farmed in various parts of the world for millenia and people gathered wild cereals before farming was invented. Different cereals in different environmental conditions, but cereals all over the place as a staple crop throughout history.

If you look at the history of cereals, you'll find references to corn in Europe long before anyone there knew America existed. It's an ancient generic term for any cereal or anything else edible that comes in small hard pieces. I only know that because years ago I was reading the ingredients list of a tin of corned beef and wondered why corned beef is called that when it's 100% beef :)
 
The thing that most impresses me regarding clever things in the past is Eratosthenes deducing a way to measure the size of the Earth using a stick. Just a stick. One stick. There were plenty of much more practical advances before then, but you can see the clear progression from natural occurence to human use (e.g. flint naturally breaks into a sharp edge, so it's not a big jump to the beginning of flint knapping).

It grates on me a little when people underestimate ancient humans. Something complicated and more than a thousand years old - must have been made by aliens! No, it bloody well wasn't. It was made by people like us. Same people, less technology. I heard someone last week saying that humans couldn't have built complex stone structures in the stone age. Eh? It was the stone age! They used stone a lot and were pretty handy at working with it. I couldn't cut stone into a regular block without modern tools, but that doesn't mean it's impossible to do so. I'd use a big, powerful vehicle to move a big block of stone for miles, but you can do it with nothing more than trees, stone tools and animal hide if you've got enough people and enough time.
 
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Yes I totally agree. Just because we don't know how ancient Egyptians built the pyramids, and we probably couldn't with the tools available to them then, doesn't mean aliens were involved. Just because I don't understand how people designed and built my TV, it doesn't mean I believe aliens were involved.
 
bitslice said:
No so bothered, no.

You know why the Taliban destroyed the Buddhas of Bamiyan*?
Because the Swiss? people sent in there to protect them were not there to give aid to the people (UN sanctions were in place).
So they said F U, and blew them up :(





*
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhas_of_Bamiyan

"Muslims should be proud of smashing idols. It has given praise to Allah that we have destroyed them."

So no, I don't give a flying fig about any muslim peasant.
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You seem like a respectable nice person.
/sarcasm
 
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