[QUOTE=Lightray]
:dubious: You’re postulating that some humans would have been unfamiliar with the idea of milk? Really?
[/QUOTE]
No, just the idea of drinking it from a species other than our own. Especially a species that might have a tendency to kick anyone who tried something like that…
Three pages in and no one has mentioned balut? Or Thousand Year Egg?
Christmas trees.
On a personal note, I’ve always been a little curious as to how the marathon became a worldwide phenomenon. “Lessee, how long to make the standard distance run…oh, look, here’s a completely random distance run by some obscure, unnamed messenger following some random battle in ancient history! And he died afterward! That’d be perfect!”
[QUOTE=BaneSidhe]
My question is who was the first person to get up the nerve to ride a bull?
[/QUOTE]
Keep in mind that we didn’t used to have bulls. We had aurochs. Which were evil minded mankilling devil cows. So we took them at serious risk to life and limb, domesticated them all over the world into a zillion different variants, and then rode the ones that were still mean as a sport. When you think about it, bull riding is a pussy sport - those were the guys without the balls to ride an auroch.
[QUOTE=Zsofia]
…those were the guys without the balls to ride an auroch.
[/QUOTE]
Actually, they used to have balls. Then they rode an auroch. With horns. And now they don’t…
[QUOTE=Don’t fight the hypothetical]
Then you m ust be a baking Og. Even with directions I don’t do bread. To think that someone concieved it before it happened boggles the mind.
[/QUOTE]
But my point is that some caveman wasn’t walking through a patch of grass and suddenly the idea of wonder bread popped into his head.
He walked through the patch of grass, and he started gnawing the ripe seeds of the grass.
Some other guy much later was walking through another patch of grass and noticed that this patch had much bigger seeds that the other patches, and figured out that gnawing these seeds would be much more reasonable that gnawing the tiny seeds of other grass species.
Some other guy much later thought the grass seeds were tough as hell, and got the idea to soak them in water for a while before eating them.
Some other guy had the idea to boil them before eating them.
Some other guy had the idea to squash the seeds between rocks to save hours of chewing time.
Some other guy had the idea to toast the seeds before eating them.
Some other guy had the idea to mix the squashed seeds with water, THEN boil them.
Some other guy had the idea to mix the squashed seeds with water, then toast them. And only here do we have the first flatbread.
Some other guy mixed the flour and water and let it sit for a while, and when he went to toast it, noticed that the dough was puffy. And only then do we have loaf bread.
And some other guy decided to let that puffing up happen on purpose every time.
And some other guys decided to add other random ingredients to the bread…dried fruit, olive oil, butter, onions, herbs, eggs, honey, meat, nuts, whatever. And people discover that adding eggs and honey and butter to the dough makes something really nice…cake. But it’s not like they saw bread and set out to invent sheet cake, they just added ingredients and cakes and cookies naturally evolved out that over thousands of years of baking.
And so on. If you want to prevent dough from rising, you have to bake it within a few minutes of being mixed, because otherwise wild yeasts are going to make it rise, and you’d have to go to some effort to prevent this from happening. It’s like fruit juice turning to alcohol, nobody had to do it on purpose because it happens naturally. If you’ve got a toddler who hides bottles of juice, you’ve experienced the same thing.
Remember that for thousands of years since the neolithic, the majority of humanity’s calories have come from a few staple foods. If you eat bread every single day for your entire life, and your ancestors did that before you, and their ancestors before them, and their ancestors before them, all the way back to some village 10,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, you can imagine that just about every permutation on “things to do with wheat” has been tried over the millenia.
[QUOTE=Hockey Monkey]
Three pages in and no one has mentioned balut? Or Thousand Year Egg?
[/QUOTE]
Well, balut is easy–I’ve had chickens hide eggs on me before and have found partially brooded eggs all mixed in with fresher eggs; it’s a nasty surprise but I guess if someone were hungry enough and had already gone to all the trouble of boiling the egg they probably wouldn’t cavil at just eating the damned thing. Not me, though, it just looks twice as pitiful as it does nasty and it looks VERY nasty.
I’m blocked from this URL at work, but this seems to relate to this discussion:
http://divinecaroline.com/article/22145/46057-it-s-preparation
I wonder about stuff like aspirin and other curative flora. “Man, have I ever got a headache; I think I’ll go chew on that willow tree.”
[QUOTE=Jennshark]
I wonder about stuff like aspirin and other curative flora. “Man, have I ever got a headache; I think I’ll go chew on that willow tree.”
[/QUOTE]
Bark is useful for other things - willow bark, for example, can be used to make strong cord - and it’s would not be at all unusual to be using your teeth at various points in that process. Although there’s still the question of whether and how anybody could make the connection that it was medicinal.
Mangetout, that’s simple, I think. ISTR that one of the steps for transforming barks into cord or rope involve chewing on the bark strip, not simply using one’s teeth as a clamp. If you’re chewing a three meter strip of willow bark to separate and condition the fibers, I think there’s ample time to realize, “Gosh, my headache/footache/toothache/etc. no longer bothers me near as much. Next time I feel pain I’m going to make some cord!”
The one I’d like to understand is what on earth inspired Mr. Nobel to mix nitroglycerin with sawdust? Or, who was the first person to was cotton with nitric acid to make guncotton, and why? Now, I grant, some of these inventions we’re talking about from more recent times, according to James Burke’s Connections series, stem from a group of natural philosophers who would mix anything with anything else, just to see what might happen. (One of the things making Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver so fascinating, and disturbing, is reading many of the things that the Royal Society were testing, just because they could finally ask the questions.) Or worse, they would be operating from what seem to us to be tragically flawed premises - and found out other things than what they thought they were looking for. Marsh gas and mal aria, for example.
“Hey fellas, I’ve got a great idea! Let’s go up in an airplane, and then ** jump out of it!**”
[QUOTE=OtakuLoki]
The one I’d like to understand is what on earth inspired Mr. Nobel to mix nitroglycerin with sawdust? Or, who was the first person to was cotton with nitric acid to make guncotton, and why?
[/QUOTE]
Um, the first is perfectly obvious, actually. A little-known and mysterious mental process entitled ‘science’ led Mr Nobel to methodically experiment with various absorbent substances that could be used to store the lethally volatile nitroglycerin as a more stable solid, after one of the regrettably frequent explosions at the family nitroglycerin factory killed his kid brother. Sawdust was discarded pretty early I believe, in favour of diatomaceous earth.
Guncotton - apparently a Swiss scientist spilt some nitric acid and wiped it up with a cotton apron - he then used his highly-trained observational skills to deduce that something unusual was happening when his apron subsequently vaporized in a flash.
Some further investigation then revealed that he had found a way of making explosive superior to the nitrated-starch and nitrated-paper methods, which in turn presumably came about since people were trying to improve on the ancient nitrated-(charcoal+sulphur) formula that was getting to be a bit old hat.
[QUOTE=panache45]
One of the most popular new medications for diabetics is Byetta. Its active ingredient is a protein, exenatide, that was initially discovered in the saliva of the Gila monster. “Hmmmm, let’s see if we can get some saliva from this lizard, and let’s inject it into Uncle Bob and see if it lowers his blood sugar.”
And then there is:
CIRCUMCISION.
[/QUOTE]
actually, I use byetta and love it.
It was explained to me fairly simply - someone noticed that the gila monster can go for extended periods without eating because it has very slow digestion. Humans have an enzyme that can also slow digestion, but it has an active level of less than 2 minutes, so unless you want to keep shooting up, you have to find something else similar in function. Some person had read about the enzyme that gila monsters have that gets triggered when food is in short supply, and noticed that it would work if modified into something a human can use, so they synthesized it and bobs your uncle…
Well, I should also admit I hate it when I have to take colchicine and indocin, as it gives me about 4 hours of extreme nausea…after my morning dose and evening dose=(
[QUOTE=Tahssa]
In the same vein. The first person to see a lobster, crab, shrimp or craw-fish and thought, “Damn I bet that thing tastes good.” was crazy.
[/QUOTE]
Damn straight. They’re all horribly grotesque-looking creatures. Lobsters look like some sort of hybrid between a cockroach and a scorpion. Absolutely not something that strikes me as being an appetizing meal.
Cheese had to have been an accident.
[QUOTE=Kyla]
Cheese had to have been an accident.
[/QUOTE]
Check out the history section of this Wiki on Roquefort cheese. That guy was clearly nuts.
[QUOTE=Kyla]
Cheese had to have been an accident.
[/QUOTE]
Alton Brown (who is not a nutritional anthropologist) suggests that cheese came about when nomadic horsemen used ruminant stomachs to store their milk for their daily rides. The rennet in the stomach linings mixed with the milk, and the continual jostling of the milk from the horse’s movement churned things up enough to make cheese.
[QUOTE=Mangetout]
Is this a whoosh? Magnetic stripes on bank cards don’t work by RF - they work by magnetism - in the same way as audio tape and hard drives.
[/QUOTE]
I wonder if mushrooms are edible?