Here’s a great article about the actual cooking methods paleo-humans used:
Use of a leather cauldron is mentioned in at least one Discworld novel.
Even better question (IMHO): how did we go from the original corn plant to the delicious cob corn we have today? And why did someone start that process?
"I found a rock with a snot in it!’
(Jim Gaffigan)
The original plant isn’t even something you’d likely recognize as corn.
If you go to Peru, you can taste traditional corn. The kernels are huge. They are hard. They have twenty percent of the sweetness and flavour of niblets. Healthier, more fibre, but like many plants bred for taste, convenience and yield - sometimes at the expense of taste (but not here).
Scientific precision is what the binomial system is for. It’s not something that can or should be expected from common names like ‘pea’ or ‘bean’.
Fun fact: black eyed peas are called black eyed beans in parts of the world that are not the USA. They are a variety of cowpea, also known as yard-long bean, also known as pea bean.
Edit: only just saw this bit. I concur. ‘bean’ is part of the common name for some plants in fabiaceae that aren’t even edible.
This mentions that modern humans have left YouTube evidence of boiling water in coconut shells, bamboo tubes, and paper cups. Basically, contract with the water prevents the vessel from burning.
(It also talks about graduate students dropping hot rocks into leather vessels filled with water until the water boiled, and suspending a deerskin full of water over a fire, which heated the water but didn’t achieve boiling.)
And there’s cassava root, which must be prepared VERY carefully lest you poison yourself: it contains cyanide, and blindness can result if you eat poorly prepared cassava. I’ve always wondered how someone figured out how this stuff that killed Grandpa can be made safe - seems like you’d try it, find that it made people die, and decide it was best avoided.
That cartoon makes no sense. Clams with legs would have a survival edge, being better able to get away from predators like the caveman. We’d still have footed clams today if this were an accurate historical representation 
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You can cook in hot springs, but a lot of them have a high mineral content which, to put it mildly, could result in bad flavors.
Clay pots are not the lowest tech.
Filling a depression in the ground with water, or filling an animal hide with water (perhaps by lining a hole with it), then heating stones in a fire, then transferring the stones to the water over and over will, eventually, result in a boil.
Another low-tech method is filling up an animal’s stomach with water and hanging it over a fire or, more likely, hot coals. It required some finicky skills, but it’s possible to bring the water inside to a boil without the “pot” catching fire. Basically, anything that holds water can be used as a pot, and as long as it doesn’t boil dry it will probably work to one degree or another.
For some legumes, yes, you can do that, although pretty much all of them are at least mildly toxic to animals with just one stomach, like us. (Not toxic to ruminants, it would seem).
Red kidney beans, however, are more toxic when raw (4 or 5 will make you sick) and if they’re heated they become more toxic unless you do it well above 80 C. You need to boil them at least 10 minutes and preferably longer. Although, with red kidney beans being a P. vulgaris they would not have been encountered until humans reached Central America somewhen about 11,000 years ago (possibly longer). By that time people had probably figured out ways to boil water when needed. Oldest pottery remains from the Americans are about 7,000-8,000 years old, but it’s possible older might be found.
A bunch of other Native foods also require heat and/or water to de-toxify, like pokeweed and acorns so presumably applying this technique to beans would not have been a big deal. (I’ve had poke, my mother-in-law used to cook it. It’s a lot of work for what you get, but it’s surprisingly flavorful for something you have to boil for at least two hours in multiple water changes. Somewhat like bok choy or spinach, but related to neither.)
All Phaseolus are slightly toxic when raw, how much varies with the cultivar. Fava beans also have this.
You can, however roast beans. I was reminded of this while doing a bit more googling these past couple days. You can get roasted chickpeas and “soynuts” commercially as snacks these days (how did I forget about that?). Humans might have roasted beans for thousands of years before boiling them. It would certainly get them hot enough to detoxify them.
Now that I think about it… roasting might well have come before the boiling techniques that are now more common these days. Roasting definitely was (and still is) used for at least a some Old World legumes. Don’t know how well that would work for things like lentils or new world beans.
That really, really does deserve a thread of its own.
Sweet corn is nothing more than corn that is eaten in the immature stage before it turns starchy and then hardens. It’s long been selected for more sweetness, and recently, a mutation that long delays the transition from sugariness to starchiness has transformed sweet corn (dubbed ‘supersweet’) so that one needn’t boil the water before you even pick the corn so you can rush it to the pot, as we did when I was a child. Even on the plant it stays sugary much longer. But that’s only in the last thirty years or something.
You cook legumes in water before you roast them, by the way. Both dry soybeans and chickpeas are very hard and require an unusually long boiling time.
We do. Almost all mollusks have a foot.
Don’t know, but that discovery was soon followed by the discovery of ways to minimize the passing of gas. LOL
Wee Free Men, for the record.
Thanks for info!
Agreed. Scientific categories and common terms can sometimes be equated, but using the scientific terms to “correct” common terminology (“Well actually Strawberries aren’t fruit!”) is not good practice, scientifically or linguistically.
But the acorn stuff was new to me. Here’s a really cool article on West Coast acorn preparation.
Nuts also occur as a staple in the Kalahari region
How do you know we don’t? Have you ever met a live clam?
