Itt: stuff that makes you wonder how it got started

itt: stuff that makes you wonder how it got started
How did someone figure out that you could drink the milk from a cow

The trial and error of seeing which mushroom was edible.

Thank you, brave caveman.

>watch child suckling wife
>watch calf suckling cow
>put two and two together

>dude drinking rotten fruit juice makes you feel good!

Who was responsible for testing out each berry to see if it was safe to eat or it would kill you????

A lot of food makes zero sense to me.

First man to eat an oyster, smelling and looking like it does, must have been desperate for food. Or how about that SEA fish that kills you if not prepared right, did they just trial and error until they could finally eat it?

How about the elder tree?

This. It's actually quite simple.

On a similar note: The people who found out that potatoes, the roots of a poisonous plant was not only edible but delicious.

People probably found a few at a time, enough to get sick but not enough to kill you.

Mushrooms are crazier, some are poisonous enough that a single one will kill you.

>to make cheese you need enzumes only found naturally in a calf belly
>some madman actually poured milk into a calf belly

>potatoes
>roots

>we have to eat calf
>open belly after calf dead to remove eatings
>ufff stinky stink
>but can eat

>... caveman.

ANIMAL MILK CONSUMPTION BY HUMANS WAS IN INITIATED BY TURANIANS —NOMADS FROM THE EURASIAN STEPPE—, NOT BY "CAVEMEN" —REGARDLESS OF WHATEVER YOU MEAN BY THAT.

I'm even more fascinated by the foods that require two steps of processing before they stop being poisonous. Foods like Taro that have to be soaked before they're non-toxic or Almonds which were toxic before domestication. Like why did someone devote that much time and energy to draw water from a stone when they could have just eaten something else?

Well whatever the english name is for 'rootfruits'

The first examples of taming wild animals must've been heart warming. It seems normal to us to have pets, so we can't even comprehend how much courage and/or love it must've taken to tame a being whose sole purpose was to kill and eat you.

It's not like you can not only observe milk being consumed by calves but infant humans consume milk.

We already have animals that do just that.

Sausages.

On the same point, I like to think haggis is an alternative branch of history for sausages - an edible "what if" scenario.

Well "edible", but you get the point.

Isn't the solution (to all except the two-step processing ones) that they were desperate?

There's a crazy Russian (redundant, I know) guy with a theory that the reason English cuisine is so dull is the relative lack of famine, compared to other nations

If you're talking about turning wolves into dogs and boars into pigs then humans had little to do with it to begin with. If I'm not mistaken those interactions started out with the animals hanging around the periphery of human camps as it was a great source for food.

What's so hard to understand about sausages? It's a good shape for storage and intestines, something you'd otherwise might consider a waste product get used.
Basically sausages are just packed meat.

For something more modern, I still don't understand how sound can be stored on a vinyl disk.

I don't even know what would make someone think that was even possible to begin with.

I read that humans started to eat cheese before milk, because they were all lactose intolerant at that time.
Cheese made them evolve a tolerance progressively, and only after that did they start to drink fresh milk.

As for cheese, it came more easily : they killed a suckling calf, and found cheese in it's stomach.

But it must have taken a fair amount of trial and error and washing various bits of and stuffing them with other bits to realize intestines work best.

>Butchering a kill.
>Hey guise this snake-tube thingy in the stomach is filled with something!
>Ew it's poop.
>Let's toss it.
>But wait, if it can safely hold poop inside you then it might be good for storing other things in aswell.
>Look at all this meat lying around.
>Look at the stream right over there.
>Oh, if I twist it I can make easily discernable portions.

Shit doesn't exactly seem like rocket science. And where else can you find a readily availible source of wrapping material that you wouldn't also want to use for something else?

theyre a tuber, you ape

Well that's a stupid name for it. I'll keep using rootfruit.

Prehistory≠history
Reported

Realizing sound is a vibration, and experience with the world in general.

>circumsision

>sanitation was shit
>no way to really clean your dick
>having a foreskin combined with those things caused infections, especially for the woman after sex
It's the same reason why pork is forbidden in islam.
It used to be a practical necessity in the old times

>rootfruit
>sensiblechuckle.gif
I shouldn't have, but bravo user.

Watching what the animals around you usually eat.

Yes, but consider how many times they had to do it to work out the correct procedure, how much to remove, etc.

This. I don't really get how some these are a mystery. Caveman sees woman feeding child with milk, caveman sees cow doing the same with a calf, caveman has little burning stick go off above his head.

>humans realize that throwing meat to wolves stops them from attacking
>over time the wolves become territorial and defend the source of free food

Why couldn't they just pull the skin down and wash it? Not everybody had phimosis surely

Well, y'see user, we're discussing

>semites

who are subgroup of

>afro-asiatics

and neither group is known for their grand intelligence. Cleverness to be sure, but not actual intelligence.

If semites aren't that smart then why is almost the entire world following a religion made by a semite?

>remove calf belly
>its shaped like a fine drinking device if you close off one end!
>process into canteen
>use it to store milk
>accidentally leave it out in the sun
>come back and see some weird shit happening, eat it anyway because you're an absolute madman

I always wondered how almost every culture, even the most isolated and backwards tribes, were able to figure out the bow and arrow

All you need to clean your dick is water and a couple of fingers to pull back the foreskin.
How lazy would you have to be that you'd rather amputate a part of your body than fiddle with it for one second every cleaning time.

It's a religious thing and not something health related user.

What part of
>cleverness
didn't you understand?

In hindsight, sure - but 99 times out of 100 they would have stopped at "Ew, it's poop".

And then there was the one guy who insisted on making poop tubes and eating them - and offering them to everyone else.

Truly a visionary.

Religion and intelligence are not naturally associated.

I don't know why, but the whole "ABSOLUTE MADMAN!" meme always makes me laugh; especially in the context of history.

Imagining some caveman going ham-hock on a calf's stomach full of cheese like his life depended on it never fails to make me smile...Just munching away like some sort of absolute madman...

It was me. I showed it to them.

To think that some bloke just stood looking at a bull then just one day he decides that when they butcher it, he is gonna roast his balls and eat it.

>C' and B' associated with manhood throughout all of human history
>Bull is held as epitome of masculine idol
>Put 2 and 2 together
>"Grogg eat cock and ball of bull for ultimate Grogg manliness"

Read the whole post you fucking retard

No.

Just look at other cultures. Native Americans and hunter gatherer cultures in general use most parts of an animal for something. Entrails would find their use for making strings because afterall, killing a giant bison or running down a wounded deer isn't easy and you want to get your moneys worth so to speak. Not farfetched for someone to look at the clean white shit tubes drying and before being sliced into strands and think, "maybe i can use this in cooking".

What said.
Laying down a large kill was quite the enterprise and people would try to use as much as they could from the carcass for maximum result. As humans are crafty fuckers they would have experimented with pretty much every part of the beast.

My biggest thing is metalworking. How did they know to mine tin and copper to make bronze? It seems like such a leap to me.

Probably by having experiences with other alloys. A rich man could support the cost of experimentation with mixing different metals.
As for how people came up with the notion of alloys I would presume that it was just basic curiosity of what would happened if you mixed two things together.

>wash it
>In a fucking desert.

Stick your dick in a fucking sandbox and wash it. And try doing that regularly.

>All you need to clean your dick is water and a couple of fingers to pull back the foreskin.

Yeah, water, something there is a fucking abundance of in the middle of fucking desert.

>Implying people actually lived in the desert.
Inbefore beduins lol
Beduins aren't people.

See

Except youre wrong the Australian abbos never figured them out.

>make dought to roast on fire
>forget about it
>it got sour
>bake it anyways and discover bread

almost anything itt food related was probably just watching what other animals ate and drank.

The real mystery is how ancestors discovered the process of tanning leather.
Who would think that pissing on animal skins would do anything?

>put fruits in pot
>forget pot
>be really hungry/thirsty when find old forgotten pot
>smells weird but be very hungry/thirsty
>drink pot's contents
>feelsgood
>repeat process

>ancestors tamed grown wolves
this is a meme.
the reality is probably closer to killing a she-wolf, finding she had pups, then deciding "meh why kill baby wolves. might as well feed them and take care of them, because I'm bored and there's nothing else to do in 6,000 BC"
boom domesticated wolves.

The puffer fish? Eating that is more recent than you think.

Haggis is literally just a sausage in a different shape, people are only grossed out because they don't consider that a regular sausage is made of the same shit.

This is something I've wondered a lot myself, unlike sharp stones used as knifes and sticks bows can't be found in nature

Once you understand the concept of sound waves, carving said precise waves onto a disk is easy.

It's actually an evolutionary concept, not a revolutionary one.

>People of yore discover hitting different objects produce different sounds.
>Discover how taut something is (Like a string or skin) changes how it sounds, meaning you can have things that are the same object produce different sounds.
>First "music" is created by people beating on object in rhythm.

>Horns of animals hollowed out and used for drinking.
>One has a hole in it, someone finds yelling into it amplifies the sound.
>Different horns make different pitched sounds.
>Primitive woodwinds born.

>Fast forward centuries later.
>Someone takes the previous knowledge that scratching across a surface produces a sound.
>Gets creative and lays out a bunch of compact surfaces that change pitch as you drag your finger across them.
>Makes a music box with a brass disc with carefully crafted holes that strike notes at the right time.
>Mates it with a clockwork engine like a watch so it no longer has to be continuously cranked.
>Eventually miniaturizes it into a vinyl record, uses a metallic needle to do the dragging.

Not just an answer to that particular question, but it irks me to no end when people equate intelligence as the end all-be all of success in the world. Evolutionary forces find the best "fit" for the environment, so intelligence isn't always the primary factor of fitness.

It started with a sling probably. And then someone found that elasticity allowed the objects to be propelled on their own.

Either that, or you know how you used to flick food at people with your spoon? Someone probably got a stick and started flicking shit at people, and then realized it worked pretty well for launching projectiles. The string came about as a way to more easily draw it, and then it was discovered you can put you projectile on the string itself.

The entirety of Polynesian cultural spread.

>LETS FOLLOW THAT BIRD IN THE GREAT BIG EXPANSE AND SEE WHERE IT GETS US.

Just wait until you take it a step further.

>Ok guys, so we can "store" music on these brass discs. Can we put other information on it?
>We can put a string of holes, but what does it all mean?
>What if we had a machine that could interpret the holes for us? We could call it "on" and "off".
>Later, becomes ones and zeroes.

Truly looking at the first computers and modern ones, you realize not a whole lot has changed except for the sheer amount of data that can be processed through one.

You have a very strange understanding of the domestication of wild animals

Neither of the claimed humans tamed wolves.