# What would Bronze Age people have used as the nearest thing to plastic or rubber? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [April 27, 2016, 6:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-would-bronze-age-people-have-used-as-the-nearest-thing-to-plastic-or-rubber/753244 "2016-04-27T06:30:51Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 15\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [April 27, 2016, 1:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-would-bronze-age-people-have-used-as-the-nearest-thing-to-plastic-or-rubber/753244/21 "2016-04-27T13:57:07Z")
> [@Toxylon](#): > > Oh, the pedantry! Alas, I’m only a professional trad tanner, in contact with a good percentage of Western colleagues in existence, and I’ve never used the word ‘layer’ in this context, nor heard it used. Streak, jargon or not, is in everyday use. > > Let’s check Merriam Webster: > > Definition of “streak”: > > 1. a narrow layer (as of fat) Sorry I tried to help. That meaning is as you say jargon and it evidently wasn’t understood by anybody but you. ---
**Author:** ![Pleonast](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pleonast/32/1183_2.png) [@Pleonast](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pleonast)\ **Post date:** [April 27, 2016, 2:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-would-bronze-age-people-have-used-as-the-nearest-thing-to-plastic-or-rubber/753244/22 "2016-04-27T14:13:33Z")
> [@Toxylon](#): > > Through-tanned leather lets water pass through readily - too well even when curried to high heavens. Yummy, curried leather with potatoes and onions over rice is delicious! ---
**Author:** ![TriPolar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tripolar/32/3008_2.png) [@TriPolar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TriPolar)\ **Post date:** [April 27, 2016, 2:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-would-bronze-age-people-have-used-as-the-nearest-thing-to-plastic-or-rubber/753244/23 "2016-04-27T14:36:17Z")
Whalebone and various forms of cartilage served as flexible, springy, stretchy, materials. Intestines, bladders, and other tissue could be used as airtight and watertight materials. Beeswax was readily harvested and very popular, but wax extracted from all kinds of plants was used as well. Twisted ropes made tension springs, as well as bowed wood and horn. Sinew was used to form composite materials with glue, and glues made from boiled hide, tissue and bone were employed. ---
**Author:** ![Quercus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/q/7ab992/32.png) [@Quercus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Quercus)\ **Post date:** [April 27, 2016, 3:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-would-bronze-age-people-have-used-as-the-nearest-thing-to-plastic-or-rubber/753244/24 "2016-04-27T15:19:05Z")
And of course, for rubber, Bronze Age-ish peoples in Central/South America used, uh, rubber. ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [April 27, 2016, 3:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-would-bronze-age-people-have-used-as-the-nearest-thing-to-plastic-or-rubber/753244/25 "2016-04-27T15:23:29Z")
> [@Quercus](#): > > And of course, for rubber, Bronze Age-ish peoples in Central/South America used, uh, rubber. Note that the natural polymerization of rubber produces something a lot different from modern rubber: ours is vulcanized ([video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPtc_bAhGeg)) (article from [open university](http://www.open.edu/openlearn/science-maths-technology/science/chemistry/rubber-and-vulcanisation)), a process which is a lot faster and which produces a much more resistant material than simply letting the goo cure. The addition of other materials (mainly coal black and zinc white) is used to produce rubbers of different hardness, different vulcanization speeds, etc. ---
**Author:** ![joema](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/a9adbd/32.png) [@joema](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/joema)\ **Post date:** [April 27, 2016, 3:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-would-bronze-age-people-have-used-as-the-nearest-thing-to-plastic-or-rubber/753244/26 "2016-04-27T15:31:07Z")
> [@Evil\_Captor](#): > > Well clearly they didn’t have plastic and rubber back in the Bronze Age… Rubber was definitely known and used during the late bronze age: > **[Rubber processed in ancient Mesoamerica, MIT researchers find](https://news.mit.edu/1999/rubber-0714)** Findings like this and many others show how misleading and faulty the stone/bronze/iron age metaphor is. The oldest known civilization is the Sumerians, which dates back to at least 5,000 BC (the “stone age”). Their inventions include the wheel, plow, writing, crop irrigation via canals and levees, formal astronomy, numbers, geometry, dentistry, musical instruments, organized school systems, lunisolar calendar, geographic mapping, glue, sailboats, and complex sewer systems including flush toilets. There have been hundreds of practice-tablets found filled with various exercises assigned by the Sumerian professor to the pupils as part of their daily schoolwork. A woman in Sumer had important legal rights: she could hold property, engage in business, and qualify as a witness. This archeological and historical reality has been known since at least the 1950s. It is a very different than the common depiction of “Og the stone-age cave man”. BTW the reason our circle has 360 degrees, our days 24 hours and our clocks 60 minutes is because the ancient “stone age” Sumerians invented all that. This is all covered in Samuel Kramer’s book “History Begins at Sumer”: [http://amzn.com/0812212762](http://amzn.com/0812212762) ---
**Author:** ![Evil\_Captor](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/f17d59/32.png) [@Evil\_Captor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Evil_Captor)\ **Post date:** [April 27, 2016, 3:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-would-bronze-age-people-have-used-as-the-nearest-thing-to-plastic-or-rubber/753244/27 "2016-04-27T15:35:45Z")
> [@Mangetout](#): > > This bit of the question makes it sound like “…and how did they access the internet?”… > > But anyway… > > Pine resin (and other plant gums and resins) was a fairly effective glue and caulk. > > Leather and rawhide is flexible and pliable, and can be shaped. > > Most of the sort of household containers we make out of plastic can be made from clay, wood, animal skin, horn or bone, or basketwork or cloth if they don’t need to hold liquids. > > To the extent that the teething needs of babies was probably recognised, animal bones, bits of hide or sinew/tendon, or strips of dried meat would probably serve pretty well. When I was thinking about this, I wondered if teething rings existed, but decided some sort of thing you jammed in a baby’s mouth when it got all cranky would exist. I know material possessions were very few for most members of Bronze Age society, but I figured the nobility would have state of the art stuff, however primitive the state of the art might be. ---
**Author:** ![md2000](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/73ab20/32.png) [@md2000](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/md2000)\ **Post date:** [April 27, 2016, 3:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-would-bronze-age-people-have-used-as-the-nearest-thing-to-plastic-or-rubber/753244/28 "2016-04-27T15:43:03Z")
> [@Fear\_Itself](#): > > Chinese lacquer is a polymer made from the sap of a tree, and the Chinese have been using it for thousands of years: Fun fact- according to my dad, who was a collector of scientific trivia before the internet… The old Chinese technique to make master quality furniture would take their items out on a boat (junk) to the open sea, then wash down the decks to get rid of any dust, then lacquer their furniture pieces. This eliminated a lot of the ambient dust specks that would typically mar a gloss finish. I assume the high humidity assisted in the finish too. ---
**Author:** ![Evil\_Captor](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/f17d59/32.png) [@Evil\_Captor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Evil_Captor)\ **Post date:** [April 27, 2016, 4:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-would-bronze-age-people-have-used-as-the-nearest-thing-to-plastic-or-rubber/753244/29 "2016-04-27T16:11:23Z")
Well, thanks, guys, I’d say you have more than adequately answered my query. I was thinking that leather, which can range in thickness and hardness from kid gloves to the stuff they make boots out of, would probably be the answer. But apparently there was a lot more. And the reason I ruled out rubber is that I was thinking of the Middle East, where rubber trees don’t grow. But I was intrigued to read about other natural latex products that might have been used. I have read science fiction stories where some native tree just happened to be a fine substitute for rubber of plastic or whatever, and wondered if they were based on any real life analogues. ---
**Author:** ![TriPolar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tripolar/32/3008_2.png) [@TriPolar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TriPolar)\ **Post date:** [April 27, 2016, 4:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-would-bronze-age-people-have-used-as-the-nearest-thing-to-plastic-or-rubber/753244/30 "2016-04-27T16:48:34Z")
We’ve made a lot of advances that allow us to manufacture substitutes for these natural materials, and new ones as well, and we also have mass production capability that makes modern materials abundant and affordable. But even in the Bronze Age the roots of mass production were taking hold. Making bronze itself required large operations to mine and prepare ores and to make charcoal. The use of pitch, wax, and oils required time, labor, tools, facilities, and other resources to refine the materials in useful quantities. The materials available were also well matched to the technology of the time. There was not much need for rubber tires on carts, wood sufficed at first, then followed by metal cladding, it would require much greater advances to produce the larger faster vehicles and smoother roads that made modern tires useful. Those technologies were developed with mainly the same materials available in the Bronze Age, iron and glass the major exceptions. Chemistry improved greatly in correspondence with the advances in mechanical technology providing our modern materials. Chemistry could have advanced before development of engines and mass production of steel, the order of events may have sometimes been driven by other technology such as the distillation of coal tar following large scale production of coke, but more likely all advances in technology are tied together in the larger mix of driving forces to innovate and improve. ---
**Author:** ![Quercus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/q/7ab992/32.png) [@Quercus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Quercus)\ **Post date:** [April 27, 2016, 4:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-would-bronze-age-people-have-used-as-the-nearest-thing-to-plastic-or-rubber/753244/31 "2016-04-27T16:58:12Z")
> [@Evil\_Captor](#): > > But I was intrigued to read about other natural latex products that might have been used. I have read science fiction stories where some native tree just happened to be a fine substitute for rubber of plastic or whatever, and wondered if they were based on any real life analogues. Evidently, [Dandelions!](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_rubber#Alternative_sources) ---
**Author:** ![Gary\_T](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/3ec8ea/32.png) [@Gary\_T](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gary_T)\ **Post date:** [April 27, 2016, 5:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-would-bronze-age-people-have-used-as-the-nearest-thing-to-plastic-or-rubber/753244/32 "2016-04-27T17:58:35Z")
> [@Nava](#): > > I think the word you’re looking for is layer, not streak. A streak would be those things on a skunk’s back; a layer would mean you have leather that’s completely tanned on both surfaces but untanned in between. A sandwich of tanned-untanned-tanned. > [@Toxylon](#): > > Oh, the pedantry! I’m only a professional trad tanner, in contact with a good percentage of Western colleagues in existence, and I’ve never used the word ‘layer’ in this context, nor heard it used. Streak, jargon or not, is in everyday use. > > Let’s check Merriam Webster: > > Definition of “streak”: > > 1. a narrow layer (as of fat) > [@Nava](#): > > That meaning is as you say jargon and it evidently wasn’t understood by anybody but you. I’d have to agree that it’s jargon. A narrow layer of fat, such as one might find in various animals, sounds like a streak to me, but a _ **thin, spread out** _ layer, such as we’re describing here, does not. And yes, this is pedantry, but not for the sake of pedantry, rather for helpful communication. I was envisioning a jacket with a stripe of rawhide going down the center of its back, because I’d never heard “streak” used in this fashion. I couldn’t make sense of it. Nitpicking aside, thank you **Toxylon** for an interesting and informative post. ---
**Author:** ![Blue\_Blistering\_Barnacle](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/blue_blistering_barnacle/32/3386_2.png) [@Blue\_Blistering\_Barnacle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blue_Blistering_Barnacle)\ **Post date:** [April 27, 2016, 7:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-would-bronze-age-people-have-used-as-the-nearest-thing-to-plastic-or-rubber/753244/33 "2016-04-27T19:13:16Z")
At a pioneer rendezvous, I saw some amazing stuff made out of horn. Apparently, after boiling it a bit, you can mold it into cups and bowls and spoons that end up looking very much like made of plastic (at least I thought so). Sounds much like the versatility of leather described above. here is a link I found: [http://www.personal.utulsa.edu/~marc-carlson/horn/horng.html](http://www.personal.utulsa.edu/~marc-carlson/horn/horng.html) ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [April 27, 2016, 7:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-would-bronze-age-people-have-used-as-the-nearest-thing-to-plastic-or-rubber/753244/34 "2016-04-27T19:45:19Z")
> [@Blue\_Blistering\_Barnacle](#): > > At a pioneer rendezvous, I saw some amazing stuff made out of horn. Apparently, after boiling it a bit, you can mold it into cups and bowls and spoons that end up looking very much like made of plastic (at least I thought so). > > Sounds much like the versatility of leather described above. > > here is a link I found: > > [http://www.personal.utulsa.edu/~marc-carlson/horn/horng.html](http://www.personal.utulsa.edu/~marc-carlson/horn/horng.html) I’ve seen a lot of things made out of horm. Yes, you can bend it after boiling (you can do that to wood, too). It’s also trslucent. They used to use thin pieces of translucent horn to cover children’s lessons on paper, making a _hornbook_. It was like plastic-laminated stuff – if it got dirty, you could clean it off, and it didn’t matter if it got wet. Perfect from primers and the like – they were immune to baby drool. > **[Hornbook](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornbook)** > > A hornbook (horn-book) is a single-sided alphabet tablet, which served from medieval times as a primer for study, and sometimes included vowel combinations, numerals or short verse. The hornbook was in common use in England around 1450, but may have originated more than a century earlier. The term (hornbook) has been applied to different study materials in different fields but owes its origin to children's education, represented by a sheet of vellum or paper displaying the alphabet, r Horn books,... [https://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images;\_ylt=A0LEV02XFiFXwTcAHy5XNyoA;\_ylu=X3oDMTByMjB0aG5zBGNvbG8DYmYxBHBvcwMxBHZ0aWQDBHNlYwNzYw--?p=Hornbook&fr=yfp-t-201#id=21&iurl=http%3A%2F%2Fs01.justpaste.it%2Ffiles%2Fjustpaste%2Fhornbook.jpg&action=click](https://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images;_ylt=A0LEV02XFiFXwTcAHy5XNyoA;_ylu=X3oDMTByMjB0aG5zBGNvbG8DYmYxBHBvcwMxBHZ0aWQDBHNlYwNzYw--?p=Hornbook&fr=yfp-t-201#id=21&iurl=http%3A%2F%2Fs01.justpaste.it%2Ffiles%2Fjustpaste%2Fhornbook.jpg&action=click) ---
**Author:** ![Fear\_Itself](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/fear_itself/32/19637_2.png) [@Fear\_Itself](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fear_Itself)\ **Post date:** [April 27, 2016, 8:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-would-bronze-age-people-have-used-as-the-nearest-thing-to-plastic-or-rubber/753244/35 "2016-04-27T20:20:32Z")
Whale baleen was also used by Eskimos in the manufacture of tools and art because of its plastic properties. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-would-bronze-age-people-have-used-as-the-nearest-thing-to-plastic-or-rubber/753244.md?page=1)