
Did our early ancestors boil their food in hot springs? - Thevet
https://news.mit.edu/2020/early-human-hot-springs-food-0915
======
tzury
In the Talmud[1] they refer[2] cooking in the Hot Springs of Tiberius in a
casual manner that makes the impression it was a regular thing to do.

    
    
        "...Likewise one who cooks with the hot springs of 
         Tiberius or that which is similar to them is exempt..."
    

We are talking about an era where fire exists, indeed, and yet some were still
doing do.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talmud](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talmud)

[2]
[https://www.sefaria.org.il/Mishneh_Torah%2C_Sabbath.9.3?vhe=...](https://www.sefaria.org.il/Mishneh_Torah%2C_Sabbath.9.3?vhe=Torat_Emet_363&lang=bi&with=all&lang2=bi)

~~~
kace91
What were they exempt from? It's a bit off topic but now I'm curious...

~~~
4cao
Looks like it's an exemption from being sanctioned for working on a Shabbat
(section 1.3 in the linked text).

~~~
tpurves
Interesting. Logically is it ‘god’ providing the work in this case of heating
the hot spring therefore exempting the person?

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phonethrowaway
Rúgbrauð (Icelandic pronunciation: [ˈruːɣprœiθ]) is an Icelandic straight rye
bread. It is traditionally baked in a pot or steamed in special wooden casks
by burying it in the ground near a hot spring, in which case it is known as
hverabrauð or "hot-spring-bread".
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%BAgbrau%C3%B0](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%BAgbrau%C3%B0)

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knodi123
It's a regular part of Maori culture in New Zealand, and tourists can do it in
places like Rotorua. They call it Hāngi.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C4%81ngi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C4%81ngi)

~~~
samatman
While I'm quite sure this is true (that Maori boil food in hot springs), the
link you've provided describes what in Hawai'i we call kalua, the centrepiece
of a luau.

I'm not at all surprised that the word for the pit oven is effectively the
same: umu in Maori, imu in Hawai'ian.

~~~
EdwardDiego
And the Hawai'ian word for chicken is the Māori word for a bunch of birds that
grew up to 2m tall and was probably terrifying to run into in dense scrub. :)

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sradman
The landing page for the paper _Microbial biomarkers reveal a hydrothermally
active landscape at Olduvai Gorge at the dawn of the Acheulean, 1.7 Ma_ [1]
states:

> The geothermal activity described here may have influenced the use of the
> space at Olduvai Gorge and may have provided advantages, such as cooking,
> which has not been previously contemplated in the context of human
> evolution.

The discovered hydrothermal feature overlaps with the timelines of H. erectus.
Richard Wrangham’s book _Catching Fire_ [2] argues that the evidence for the
consumption of energy dense food processed by fire is found in the physiology
(small teeth, small gut, large brain) and reach (Eurasia) of erectus.

The speculation about hot spring cooking distracts from the significance of
the find, in my opinion.

[1]
[https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/09/14/2004532117](https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/09/14/2004532117)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catching_Fire:_How_Cooking_Mad...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catching_Fire:_How_Cooking_Made_Us_Human)

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zygy
A few years ago I visited Niigata and some surrounding semi-rural towns where
people still do this. They have onsens that are designated for food, not
people. :)

~~~
_Microft
I had to look up "onsen". It's the japanese term for hot springs.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onsen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onsen)

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sfmike
here in tamsui in taiwan they cooked eggs in the hot springs

~~~
verst
So instead of 淡水 (Tamsui / Danshui) more like 蛋水

(Both of these sound the same with the same tones, but I replaced the first
character with the one for egg of the same sound, hence meaning egg water.)

------
SubiculumCode
What I never understood is why cooking was needed by early humans. Other
animals eat raw food, and scavengers don't even eat freshly killed food, yet
they do just fine. Sure, I can understand as humans moved to cooked food that
we may have lost our ability to handle food in these states. The only thing I
could think of is that the caloric advantage of digesting meat offered an
immediate advantage.

~~~
brnt
Our gastrointestinal tract is designed for fruit, like most apes. Not plant or
meat. Out of adaptation to new locales without abundant fruit, we've had to
learn how to properly preprocess things were not very good at processing
ourselves.

~~~
msla
Except chimps hunt, and get important nutrients from meat, early humans hunted
and scavenged meat, and nothing about our digestive system allows us to get as
much out of plant matter (including fruit) as an herbivore can; for one thing,
we can't digest cellulose.

[https://www.americanscientist.org/article/meat-eating-
among-...](https://www.americanscientist.org/article/meat-eating-among-the-
earliest-humans)

~~~
brnt
See reply to other comment. The reason to eat fruit is to get easy access to
sugar, which we need especially due to our brains. Like how some birds require
nectar to be able to power their flight.

All animals supplement diets, but despite cows licking saltstone we still
observe them getting the majority of intake from other sources.

~~~
msla
We need sugar to power our brains, but we need protein and fat to build our
brains. That requires more than incidental amounts of protein.

~~~
ben_w
For that to be a good counter-argument, you would need to demonstrate that
vegetable protein was “merely incidental” in the case you are arguing against.

~~~
eyko
Vegetable protein was and still is less abundant than vegetable sugars, if I'm
not mistaken? Agriculture eventually made that less of an issue but this was
not the case until not that long ago (tens of thousands rather than hundreds
of thousands of years). It's easier to eat a bug or any small prey than spend
a morning gathering spinach and watercress. Humans also ate leftovers from
predator kills, like the partially digested contents of herbivore stomachs
that had been killed by let's say wolves.

Vegetable protein was part of our diet but not by any means the main source of
protein. Humans did not eat pulses until quite recently (10-15 thousand years
ago?)

~~~
rewq4321
> Vegetable protein was and still is less abundant than vegetable sugars, if
> I'm not mistaken?

I'm no expert here, but humans do tend to need far more carbs than protein to
be healthy - or at least can operate on something like 10% protein per joule
of food consumed. And that's with a decent safety buffer. I think the
predictions (based on natural experiments - i.e. famines) were that you could
push as low as 4% before a human body can't handle it. Though I'd guess that
if you get anywhere close to that your body is going to start making some
significant trade-offs.

Also: Don't forget about nuts and seeds.

> Vegetable protein was part of our diet but not by any means the main source
> of protein.

I think a citation (or three) is needed here.

~~~
amanaplanacanal
People can be perfectly healthy on a wide range of carbohydrate intake. Native
peoples in the Arctic lived almost entirely on animals, for example, whereas
there were tropical island societies that lived almost entirely on plant
sources.

~~~
rewq4321
> People can be perfectly healthy on a wide range of carbohydrate intake

Again, citation needed there. The recommendation of all major national and
international dietetics associations (based on currently available peer-
reviewed studies) is that a healthy diet should consist mostly of
carbohydrates.

There certainly are "extreme" diets, but these seem to require at least a bit
of genetic adaptation:

> "a new study[0] on Inuit in Greenland suggests that Arctic peoples evolved
> certain genetic adaptations that allow them to consume much higher amounts
> of fat than most other people around the world"

[https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/09/17/441169188/th...](https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/09/17/441169188/the-
secret-to-the-inuit-high-fat-diet-may-be-good-genes)

[0]
[https://science.sciencemag.org/content/349/6254/1343](https://science.sciencemag.org/content/349/6254/1343)

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theironlily
ah yes, the original sous vide method of cooking ;)

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Giorgi
I don't know about cooking because thermal waters tend to be sulfuric but for
example - Tbilisi was a settlement of hunters who would use "free" hot water
to make animal leather soft.

Archaeologists discovered evidence of continuous habitation of the Tbilisi -
since the early Bronze Age, and stone artifacts dating to the Paleolithic age.

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4cao
They were lucky to be using hot springs with temperatures north of 80°C
(176°F). Not sure what the median temperature of a hot spring is but
anecdotally it seems many are not that hot, which makes them perfect breeding
ground for amebas and also the Legionella bacteria.

~~~
Arubis
Presumably, humans consistently using hot springs such as the ones you
describe to prepare food either found the experience punishing or simply
didn’t live to record the results.

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ChrisMarshallNY
So...Shabu-Shabu is the oldest cooking method.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shabu-
shabu](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shabu-shabu)

~~~
082349872349872
In our times "dishwasher cooking" is a productive search term.

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moltar
I’d be surprised if they didn’t. If a crow can figure out how to drop nuts
under the car path, then I’m sure early humans have figured out a bunch of
stuff too.

~~~
galago
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catching_Fire:_How_Cooking_Mad...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catching_Fire:_How_Cooking_Made_Us_Human)

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BerislavLopac
My personal favourite hypothesis is that they lived in hot springs.

