From the Vault: The Invention of the Spoon, Part 1

It’s time for another invention-based classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. In this episode, Robert and Joe discuss a very old invention that we can scarcely imagine life without: the spoon. (originally published 3/9/2021)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. We're off
this week, so we are bringing you a vault episode.
This is the Invention of the Spoon Part one. You
wouldn't think you could really talk about the invention of
the spoon, but theyre turned out to be much more
to say than you might expect. Yeah, quite a bit.
Uh So this is a fun one. Hopefully this will

(00:28):
change your relationship with your spoon. Welcome to stot to
Blow Your Mind, production of My Heart Radio. Hey, welcome
to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert
Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And today we're gonna be

(00:49):
talking about an invention. Rob I think this will be
in the tradition of our episode on chopsticks that we
did a while back. Why is it that you so
often suggest discussing the invention of a of a device
with no moving parts that is used to eat. I
don't know, like part of it, Mainly like in this case,
I was looking at another topic and I kind of

(01:11):
hit a wall on it, and I was like, oh man,
I'm not excited about this topic. Anymore. And um, and
then I don't know, you kind of like you think
to yourself, well, what's something smaller, What's something that couldn't
possibly hurt me? And you realize the spoon. It's right there,
it's in the drawer. I love spoons or you know,
in previous case, chopsticks. And I know they've got to
be a fascinating history. You know, it's like one of

(01:33):
some of these inventions that are, you know, so ancient.
We're not going to pick out the individual that invented
these things or anything like that, but it is fascinating
how they move through human civilizations. Oh so I understand
the spoon was your stay puffed marshmallow man. You were
trying to think of something so innocent and good that
it could never hurt anyone. And and this is where

(01:54):
we came to. But I I was I was surprised,
as I always am, because I think we found some
pretty interesting stuff about the invention of the spoon. Yeah,
like if you if you think you know the spoon,
if you think spoons are boring, well then um, we'll
stay tuned because there's there's some cool stuff. Uh. And
and also you know, when you really stop to think
about it and you really sort of start to consider it. Yeah,

(02:15):
it does get quite uh quite quite fascinating. As as B.
Wilson pointed out in an Atlantic article, that will come
back to what your spoon says about you. From There
are foreign cultures, there are chopstick cultures. But every culture
is a spoon culture. And of course it's not just
not just one type of spoon. There are a lot
of different types of spoons. And I would like everyone

(02:37):
out there to try and just imagine a day, a
day in your life without access to any sort of spoon. Okay,
so you're up in the morning, you're trying to get
ready for work. Uh, you make your coffee and maybe
you add some cream deer coffee. But what do you do, Well,
you stick your finger in and burn it as you
stir it around. And then after that you got some oatmeal.

(02:57):
But how are you gonna get that oatmeal in your mouth? Well,
you're just reaching in with your fingertips and shoving it
in there, and that's gonna be crusty later on, but
you're in a hurry, uh, And then it goes on
from there. Yeah, I mean, even going back to the
coffee like all right, you're you're you're gonna good coffee
grounds and put them into your coffee brewing device or
or or or vessel. How are you going to measure

(03:19):
that stuff out? You know, now some of this we're
getting into the distinction of what is a what is
a scoop, what is a cup, what is a spoon?
But essentially, like spoons are are a way that we
measure stuff as well, we'll get into that. So imagine yourself.
You know, you're just gonna have to make that kind
of like rough Rugger hour coffee in the morning where
you're not really you're not really putting a lot of

(03:40):
thought into it, just throwing it in there, then putting
some boiling water and then just let the cream fall
where it will depraved. Now, for my part, I often
play a kind of game in the morning. So I
get up, I make my coffee. Sometimes I get to
finish watching part of a of a movie for Weird
House or something, uh, and then every body else gets up,

(04:01):
we do what we do breakfast, and at some point
I uh, I either unloved the dishwasher or I help
unlove the dishwasher. And for a long time, uh, now
I've been playing this kind of game in my head,
um where I consider all of the various utensils and
plate types teams and the winning team is the one
that managed to get the most members of their team

(04:23):
into the dishwasher the previous day. Um so, so I've
I've since told my family about this. My son gets
in on the on the fund too. Now you know,
it might be a banner day for Team Fork or
Team butter Knife, for Team Ramikins. Sometimes Team Ramikins really
really cleans it up for those the days where you
have executed a good mies on plus while making dinner,

(04:46):
all right, we used we end up using Ramicans for
a lot of different things. So it's like you know,
puddings and or snack mix. You know you don't want
to eat right out of the bag, you put it
into the Ramikins. So there are days when the when
the Ramikan team does goes quite well. But my my
favorite team and the team that seems to win the
most is of course Team Spoon. Uh. And there are
days where just the three of us we managed to

(05:06):
use not only all the all the big spoons and
all the little spoons, but also say both grapefruit spoons,
the weird sugar spoon that we don't actually use because
we don't use a like a sugar um caddy thing
or and also the odd spoon that's in the drawer
that doesn't match anything else, that's like left over some
from from some other set or something. Um, so nobody's

(05:28):
left on the bench for team spoon. Everybody's in the
game and they win. This is like one of those
big tag team matches where suddenly everybody ends up in
the ring. They're all pouring out. Yeah. Yeah, the serving spoons,
wooden cooking spoons, you name it. So yeah, it's it's
it's really hard for me to imagine a day without
using spoons. I don't even know. I don't even want

(05:48):
to tell people to take the no spoon challenge and
tell us how it goes, because it just it doesn't
sound fun. So really, just think of all the things
we use a spoon four so mixing, stirring, measuring, serving, eating,
and and just think of all the foods they work
well with. I feel like I can depend on the
spoon for just about everything, with occasional use of chopsticks

(06:10):
as well, but I rarely use a fork. Um and
part of it is my you know, I don't know,
I've gotten to where I kind of think of the
fork is maybe just two pointy and maybe too violent.
But but but I just rarely need one. If I'm
going to depend on the spoon. The spoon can do
pretty much everything the fork can and if it if
it can't, then I've got the chopsticks to depend on. Yeah,

(06:31):
I mean, I guess it depends largely on what kinds
of foods you eat the most in your house. But
we're the same way we Uh. I'd say probably at
least three quarters of our meals involve either a spoon, chopsticks,
or both, but probably only maybe one in four involves
a fork. So, in keeping with past invention episodes, uh,

(06:53):
let's start where we always start, what came before, what
came before the spoon? Well, obviously eating with one's fingers, right, well, yes,
uh uh, And you know for that, for further exploration
of that, we of course can look at some examples
from our primate cousins. So, first of all, in addition

(07:13):
to just sort of like sticking your hands and things
and licking things off your fingers, uh, there's of course
using cupped hands, especially for liquids, for things like water. Um,
these of course allow even modern humans to form a
cup or a bowl out of their own body. But
there's a there's a there's a lot of stuff. Expoons
have been around so long. Uh that. Yeah, oftentimes they're mundane,

(07:35):
but sometimes there's stuff, uh their uses of it that
are maybe a little more insightful. For instance, in Jewish tradition,
there's the the allegory of the long spoons. Yeah, this
is a story that's that gets told in sort of
sermons and religious teaching a lot. I think it's Actually
I was looking around and I don't think anyone, as
far as I could tell, has identified a certain origin

(07:55):
of this story. There seemed to be a lot of
cultural variations, including a Chinese verse gen that that references chopsticks,
and then versions of the reference spoons. Actually, I think
I should tell the other version of it first because
it makes more sense. So, uh So, the version I
read was that a you know, a teacher comes up
to his rabbi and says, Rabbi, tell me the difference

(08:16):
between heaven and Hell, and the Rabbi says, well, at
at in both heaven and hell, everyone is seated at
a at a great table for a feast, and there
is plenty of delicious food out in front of them,
you know, steaming bowls of delicious stew. But in both
Heaven and Hell, people cannot bend their arms at the elbow.

(08:36):
And yet while that means everyone in Hell starves because
they can't bring the food up to their lips, everyone
in Heaven is sated because they don't try to feed themselves.
They feed each other. And then a variation on this
story is that instead of being unable to bend your
arms at the elbow, uh, the only utensils are very

(08:56):
long utensils that make it difficuent. So you like can't
feed self, but you could feed somebody else. So a
long spoon would be I guess one that's hard to
used to get up to your own face. Okay, well,
I see the point they're making, But also just the
idea of being like a Star Wars action figure uh
in in the afterlife and not being able to move
your your your your arms having only like one point

(09:19):
of articulation. Maybe too, that does sound like torment. I mean,
I think the point that's trying to make is maybe
not literally supposed to be about heaven and hell, but
but about how uh you know, the kind of Ebenezer
Scrooge concept that a person who is selfish creates a
hell of their own making by their continued inability to
to think of other people. Right right, yeah, But put

(09:42):
enough miserable people in one place, in that place will
become a place of misery just by virtue of their
their personalities. But I guess one thing that that does
highlight is that maybe a lot of times we don't
appreciate enough the minute physical features of a spoon and
how much difference that makes and how use able it is. Uh,
this makes me think at least about how hard it

(10:03):
is to eat with a spoon that is just slightly
too big, you know, Like that's another thing we don't
often think about. So a spoon, of course, when used
as an eating utensil, as a means of conveyance, you know,
it gets the food from the plate of the bowl
into your mouth. But it's not just any means of conveyance.
It's also in effect a measuring device. It measures out

(10:24):
an appropriately sized bite of food or you know, quantity
of food to fit in your mouth at one time.
And so a spoon it's too small or spoon that's
too big is actually very weird and frustrating to eat with. Yeah, yeah,
it's well, we'll keep coming back to this. But when
you think about a given spoon design, the spoon is

(10:45):
it's it's design is going to be influenced by what
sorts of foods it is it was designed to deal with.
But then also its design is going to have an
impact on how you eat and like in terms of
like how much you're tempting to put in your mouth
at one time, but also how you hold the spoon
and therefore how you carry yourself, uh like, you know,

(11:06):
socially and and and mannerally at the dinner table or
wherever you happen to be eating. So it's you know,
it's it's this thing that that that has a has
a big impact on the way we behave and the
way we we consume, even if we just think of it.
It's this this often disposable item, uh that comes with
the meal. You know. Looking at this topic made me wonder,

(11:28):
are there any studies looking at the psychological effects of
eating directly with the hands versus using utensils. I'm sure
somebody must have looked at that I found at least
one study. I probably wouldn't hang too much on this
one result, but but it it did seem interesting. So
this was a paper published in the Journal of Retailing,

(11:48):
so not like a psychology journal but like a business
journal by Adriana V. Majurov, called self Control and Touch.
When does direct versus indirect touch increase hedonic of evaluations
and consumption of food? And the short version of what
the study found is that among people who apply self
control during food consumption. So I think this is especially

(12:12):
people who are being careful, people who are watching what
they eat. I don't know if the same would apply
to people who are just, you know, just kind of
shoveling it in there. But among people who show high
self control when eating food, touching food directly with the
hands enhances the sensory experience and increases hedonic evaluations of food.

(12:32):
So people who eat with their fingers directly versus eating
the same food with the spoon report finding that food
more pleasurable to eat and they eat more of it. Mhm, well,
that's interesting. It almost makes me wonder if there could
be a kind of small role for the spoon and
other utensils in the evolution of of human food and

(12:54):
cuisine and culture in uh, tempering the appetite like sort
of making hold back a bit, and how much you
eat in anyone sitting Huh. That is yeah, I had
not really thought about that. But then, like you said,
this is just one study, and of course it raises
the raises the point um that we have various food
cultures around the world, and some of them are more

(13:16):
inherently based on eating with hands versus eating with utensils,
And like, you know, this kind of broad statement, how
does that apply to like this cuisine, this food culture
versus this one, Like it could be where it's like, oh, well,
I just I've never stopped to touch chili before, but
now when I'm eating chili with my hands, yes, I

(13:37):
suddenly feel far more hedonic. Uh. I don't know. Well,
to whatever extent this is generally applicable. If it is,
I think it would, you'd have to confine at least
this result to foods that could be eaten either way, right,
because a lot of foods you you basically can't eat
them except with the spoon, I guess maybe slurping from
a bowl. You know, soups and porridges and stuff which

(13:58):
are we should remember a huge portion of all the
foods that humans have eaten throughout history of a lot
of foods are liquid based. All right, well, let's let's
back up just a little bit and uh and consider
primates again. So we're talking about hands coming together and
forming natural cups or natural spoons again, we can, we

(14:20):
can kind of the terminology kind of breaks down when
you're dealing with the like the pre spoon approaches to
this to the same functions. But I was reading about
this in an article. This is a nat geo from
Liz Langley called Meet the Beatles that harvest fog in
the Desert and uh. The author mentions a few different
examples of curious things that animals do to get to

(14:41):
get their their food or their their liquids. And they
mentioned that, uh that Southeast Asian gibbons drink water through
cupped hands, sometimes while hanging inverted. Now, of course, the
spoon that we're using, the spoon you probably used today,
it is, of course, uh, an artifact. It is a
you know, a thing that we have made out of
other objects or other materials. But the step right before

(15:06):
creating an artifact, in the words of anthropologist Window Oswald,
is a nature fact, that's a naturally occurring object used
intentionally but without modification for some purpose. Uh so. Jane
Goodall actually observed chimpanzees using blades of grass as a
kind of spoon to consume termites in the nineteen sixties,
and I ran a carre Off say two thousand fifteen

(15:27):
paper publishing the Royal Society Open Science. They found that
chimps use leaves as a kind of spoon or cup
to drink alcohol seeping from palm trees, leafy shot glass,
Yeah exactly. Now. Likewise, before humans crafted the first spoons
or something, or the proto spoons, they likely used found
pieces of wood and especially shells. It's pointed out by

(15:50):
the California Academy of Sciences, which has a page on spoons.
Both the Greek and Latin words for spoon are derived
from cochlea, meaning a spiral shaped nail shell. Uh This
may point to the origins of the spoon in Europe
at least, you know, taking taking a shell, a found
shell and using that as a spoon. And of course
we see this reflected sometimes in um are more elegant

(16:13):
spoon designs where the spoon itself, the cup of the
spoon is made, the bowl of the spoon is made
to look like a shell. Oh yeah, and I've used
a spoon like that before. I think it's some family
member's house at some point. Uh. It was like a
ladle that was shaped like a like a shell that
had the ridges and it was annoying to use. You

(16:34):
utensil nerds out there will have to let us know,
because I know that the collectors really get into the
exact terminology for not only the different types of spoons
but also the styles, et cetera. But I know I've
seen him before. I feel like it was used as
a as a sugar spoon or something. Um. But then
the you know, another question arises here is a shell
really a spoon? Are we doing even if you take

(16:56):
the shell and you attach it to a stick, you know,
are are we dealing with things or functions? Uh? This
is a question raised by Polish linguist Anna Versbeca of
the Australian National University in the idea of a spoon semantics,
prehistory and cultural logic in UM. And I have to say,
if you want, if you want a deep but approachable

(17:16):
paper on what it means to call something a spoon. Uh,
then this is this. I mean, it's a really good article,
like you'll you'll know if if it that sounds laughable,
I recommend looking it up. You can find it online. Um,
it's quite enjoyable. We're not going to get into all
the points that they raise, but we'll get into some
of it. Does it does it shred that matrix scene? Oh?

(17:37):
What was the what was the spoon matrix scene? It's
been a while I haven't gotten around in my rewatch. Well,
it is that there's a little boy within the matrix
who's telekinetically bending a spoon, and then Kian who tries
to do it and he fails, and the little boy
tells him the problem is that he's trying to bend
the spoon instead of realizing that, in fact, there is
no spoon. There is no spoon. Of course now I

(17:58):
remember it, Um, I don't. I don't think they specifically
mentioned that, but I think I think it's some of
the gnostic themes of the Matrix coming through in the
idea that the true enlightenment and power comes from realizing
that material reality is an illusion. Ah gotcha all right? Well, uh,
I want to read just a bit from Rebecca's article here. Quote.

(18:21):
When the focus is on things rather than concepts, it
is indeed impossible to draw a line between spoons and
sort of spoons. There are many shades of gray between
a puritan that's the type of spoon that will discuss
later on in the episode and a shell, or between
a carved spoon and a chip of wood. There is
no such shading, however, between the concept spoon and concept

(18:43):
shell or chip of wood. The invention of the spoon,
like the invention of the wheel, is a conceptual breakthrough.
Without a clear distinction between things which are made for
purpose according to a certain blueprint and things which are
merely used for a purpose with no crystallized creative idea
behind them, we can hardly make any firm generalizations about
cultural history, prehistory, and the history of cooking and eating.

(19:07):
And then they go on to say, quote, I submit
that cultural kinds are based on complex ideas born in
individual human minds and the context of particular needs, ideas
that have caught on in certain communities and have become
embedded in social practices, and that without identifying these ideas
we cannot fully understand the practices based on them. And

(19:27):
from here they point to, you know, to a very
important consideration in the birth or invention of the spoon.
That it arises in a large part due to the
importance of soft, watery cereal based foods such as gruels
and porridges in given cultures, and so different sorts of
spoons that we find in different cultures are tied to
specific food cultures. Well, yeah, if you want to jump

(19:50):
right into it, I could discuss some some specific evidence
on exactly that front. Yeah, why not, there there are
no rules, were just digger spoons in wherever. Alright, well,
I guess that means we're gonna jump to the part
of the episode where we try to find the oldest
spoon known of uh. And and one thing that I

(20:12):
think is worth noting is that if you're generous with
what you would call a knife in the context of
culinary use, I think it's extremely clear that the knife
predates the spoon. The fork doesn't, but the knife does. Well.
It makes sense, right because we've talked about the ways
that the hand can do things that a spoon can do.
And uh, but but there are things that a knife

(20:33):
can do that, the hand cannot do that, the teeth
cannot do right. Uh So, the further you go back,
the evidence gets more ambiguous. But there's no question at
all that by a few hundred thousand years ago, like
like two hundred thousand years ago, our ancestors were using
sharpened pieces of stone of often flint and other stones
that are suitable for napping to create blades. And actually

(20:56):
the evidence uh I was checking recently, it goes back
even farther than that sased on recent discoveries in in Africa.
Um I think there is evidence of stone blades going
back at least half a million years or so from Kenya,
and there might be stuff even earlier now. But probably
a major one of the uses for early stone knives
was for the processing of animal carcasses. So if you

(21:18):
have been hunting, or you've come across a dead animal
and you're trying to strip the meat from the bones
or cut the meat into usable pieces of usable size,
a sharpened piece of stone will help you do that.
So again, if you if you're generous with what counts
as a knife, knives obviously go way way back deep
deep human and even uh even pre Homo sapiens, but

(21:41):
with spoons specifically. A lot of the stuff on the internet,
if you're looking around for the oldest spoons, it ends
up talking about stuff from ancient Egypt or wherever, which
is very interesting and we will talk about. But you
know that there must be stuff earlier than that, at
least as far back as the Neolithic. So I went
searching in the scientific literature. I was trying to find
uh an authoritative attempt at cataloging the oldest spoons in

(22:04):
the archaeological record, and I did come across something. There
does appear to be some ambiguity in this one too,
because there are things you can find from from the
Stone Age and you can argue is this a spoon
or not. But at some point, certainly a little bit
before the Neolithic, and then definitely during the Neolithic, we
get clear evidence of spoons. Um. So I found one

(22:26):
recent paper that gives a good rundown of the existing evidence.
This is a paper by Sofia Stefanovic at All called
bone Spoons for Prehistoric Babies Detection of human teeth marks
on the Neolithic artifacts from the site grod Starcevo. That
is impressive. You know, I didn't think about that. But
like feeding a baby, it's first foods. Those foods have

(22:48):
to be well one way or another. They you know,
they have to be mashed up, they have to be
soft foods. And babies, you know, they can they can
spit out and they can bite with their little gum
now so uh yeah, I could see and and and
eventually teeth. Uh yeah, anyway, go on, I'm just I'm
astounded here. I didn't think about this at all. Yeah, this,
this paper was really interesting to me. So um so

(23:10):
whereab I've attached a picture of some of these spoons
for you to look at for reference. They aren't spoons
like we would imagine today that have a rounded cup
area there there. They look more kind of like tiny
scoop paddles made of bone. Yeah. Yeah, now is Stefanovich
at all discuss here? The earliest solid evidence of consistent

(23:33):
cultural spoon use pops up in the Neolithic period. Now,
remember the Neolithic period is the last part of the
Stone Age. This is still the the age and human
development where cultures are dominated by stone tools. But this
is coinciding with or after the invention of agriculture. So uh,
it's usually imagined to begin roughly twelve thousand years ago.

(23:55):
I think there's there's a good bit of looseness and
and how those years apply, especially depending on like what
particular region you're talking about. But roughly twelve thousand years
ago or so we go into the Neolithic era, and
and significantly this coincides with the invention of agriculture and
the widespread use of spoons. Before the Neolithic, there is

(24:17):
some evidence of spoons, but in the words of the
authors here, these pre Neolithic spoons are quote rare and
isolated occurrences, and they give a few examples. One is
something cited by an archaeologist named John Nandress that was
published in the Bulletin of the Institute of Archaeology in
nineteen seventy two. I could not find the full text
on this, but the citation is uh for a single

(24:39):
instance of an artifact from the paleolithics of the Old
Stone Age going way back that Nandrous interpreted as a
spoon made out of bone. For more solid evidence, the
authors here site quote the earliest secure find of a
pre Neolithic spoon was documented at a geometric kebaran site

(25:00):
of Uyun al Hamam, which which was context dated to
about sixteen and a half thousand years ago or sixteen thousand,
five hundred years ago roughly. Now, I followed this up.
I went to the study they were talking about, and
this is a study by Lisa A. Mar at All
called a unique human fox burial from a pre Natufian

(25:21):
cemetery in the Levant, Jordan's and this was published in
pl Os one in two thousand eleven. And this also
was really interesting. So this is this is one of
the earliest examples known of a spoon in the archaeological record,
and it's being attributed to what is being called here
the pre Natufian culture. Now, if you've been listening to
the show for a while and the idea of the

(25:42):
Natufian culture rings a bell, this is the modern name
for a late Paleolithic culture that lived in the Levant,
So you think modern day Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Jordans
and the Natufian culture is really interesting from a historical
technological perspective because they sort of show signs of practices

(26:05):
that are associated with agriculture, but before the apparent invention
of agriculture, So a lot of things you might think
of as as associated with agriculture like a sedentary existence, uh,
you know, remaining in one place for prolonged periods of time.
Things like cemeteries and architecture and certain types of culinary innovations.

(26:27):
All these things we think of as associated as as
sort of stemming from the farming existence. But then the
Natufians showed some evidence of these practices before they had
settled farming. So you might think of the Natufians as
sort of classic hunter gatherers who had started making a
bridge to the kinds of things we see in the

(26:48):
sedentary agricultural lifestyle popping up in in millennia later without
technically planting crops yet, or at least not doing that much. Okay, yeah,
so yeah, it makes sense that this would be the
type of people where you might find something like the spoon,
which you know, as will continue to discuss here, he
is seemingly inherently linked with you know, ultimately it's widespread

(27:09):
use with the with the the agricultural revolution. Right. So here,
this is another thing you might recall the reason it's
come up on the show. Before we talked about the
Natufian culture in the context of our invention episode on
Bread and Toast. Remember this rob Yeah. So there was
this study that we talked about by Iran's oteg we

(27:30):
at all By published in Proceedings of the National Academy
of Sciences, and this was the Bread before Farming study,
which looked at evidence from Natufian cooking sites in Jordan's
from about fourteen thousand years ago, so again before there
was really any signs of organized agriculture, uh, And they
found what looked like the charred remains of bread crumbs

(27:53):
in the cooking sites. In other words, it looks like
these people were making bread before they were planting cereal crops.
So this would have meant harvesting grain from wild grasses
and then you know, doing the culinary innovation work of
putting together these grains with other ingredients to make a
kind of bread. I think this would This would have

(28:14):
been iron corn wheat, which is a wild strain of
wheat grass, and then something called the roots of club
rush tubers, and then also there were some other things
mixed in the spices like mustard and trace amounts of barley.
And it looks like what happened is they would make
this dough out of these grains and then cook it
on the heated stone walls lining their fire pits, which

(28:38):
is actually kind of similar to the way that Indian
non bread is made in the walls of a tanduri
even today. So anyway, that was the context on Yeah,
so Natufians apparently being grain innovators, people who are coming
up with new and potentially revolutionary ways to cook with
the grains of wild grasses. And of course that would
that would have been in me potential not only Brad,

(29:01):
but Brad's sibling Porridges, right, exactly right. So coming back
to this two thousand eleven study by mar at All,
remember this is the one from the one called a
unique human fox burial from a pre Natufian cemetery in
the Levant, and so I just want to read from
the author's abstract here so we can see what's going on.
They write, quote, new human burials from Northern Jordan's provide

(29:23):
important insights into the appearance of cemeteries and the nature
of human animal relationships within mortuary contexts during the Epipalaeolithic period.
So this is roughly twenty three thousand years ago to
about eleven thousand, six hundred years ago. Picking up with
them in the Levant, reinforcing a socio ideological relationship that

(29:45):
goes beyond predator prey. Previous work suggests that archaeological features
indicative of social complexity occur suddenly during the latest Epipalaeolithic phase,
the Natufian again, that's roughly fourteen five hundred years ago
to about eleven thousand, six hundred years ago. These features
include sedentism, so a subtled existence, cemeteries, architecture, food production

(30:12):
including animal domestication, and burials with elaborate mortuary treatments. So
I think this is what we were talking about just
a little while ago, the idea of settled existence and
showing cultural practices that we associate with with agricultural societies.
They write, Our findings from the pre Natufian Middle Epipalaeolithic

(30:33):
cemetery of Uyun al hamm Um demonstrate that joint human
animal mortuary practices appear earlier in the Epipalaeolithic. We described
the earliest human fox burial in the Near East, where
the remains of dogs have been found associated with human
burials at a number of Natufian sites. This is the

(30:53):
first time that a fox has been documented in association
with human interments predating the Natufian and with a particular
suite of grave goods. Analysis of the human and animal
bones in their associated artifacts provides critical data on the
nature and timing of these newly developing relationships between people
and animals prior to the appearance of domesticated dogs in

(31:15):
the Natufian. Yeah, So in these graves they do find
an example of humans buried alongside a fox and coming
to the spoon. In particular, there is one of these graves,
it's Grave eight, which they say they find a spoon
slash spatula that consists of quote, a tibial shaft fragment
from a red deer service a laugh us with one

(31:38):
end broken at a at an oblique angle and tapering
to a rough point, while the other end has been
smooth to form a shallow depression. So it appears this
is one of the earliest clear indications of a spoon
in the archaeological record from this pre Natufian burial site.
And this is so interesting, Uh, something I don't know.
Sparks are going off in my brain. You might not

(32:00):
imagine to find these things going together, some of the
earliest clear evidence of a spoon and some of the
earliest known burials of a human with a fox buddy. Yeah, yeah,
like you' attempted to try and connect the tow like
maybe spoons are helpful for feeding pat foxes. I don't know.
I mean, I in in the care of a pat,

(32:20):
we do find ourselves using spoons. Oh you know, I mean,
I gotta. You gotta get the food out of a
can one way or another, you gotta. I wasn't trying
to be that direct in the connection, but it does. Yeah, yeah,
I mean, I see what you're saying there. It suggests
that there's some kind of a ferment underlying both perhaps, Yeah,

(32:41):
but anyway, coming back to that first study, uh, Stefanovitch
at all summarizing other early evidence for spoons in the
archaeological record, Stefanovitch at all right quote bone spoons were
also present in the Natufian again, that's a fourteen point
five to eleven point five thousand years ago, and in
Mesolithic Europe in the material culture of the Circumbaltic hunter gatherers. However,

(33:05):
the ubiquity and quantity of spoons in bone tool assemblages
significantly increases in the Neolithic period, especially in the early
Neolithic of Anatolia and the Balkans and they are primarily
a Neolithic phenomenon. So once we hit the Neolithic era, uh,
there's agriculture spreading all around where in this final stage
of the Stone Age tool set, UH, spoons start showing

(33:28):
up all over the place. And this really does appear
to be connected to the advent of agriculture. Humans are
living a more settled existence. They're practicing both the farming
of cereal crops and animal agriculture, which importantly provides milk.
And UH, spoons are showing up all over the place.
So what does this mean? And to me this gets
into the even more fascinating part of the Stevanovitch study

(33:51):
because what it's actually looking at here is the is
the invention of the earliest spoons in the context of
broader shifts in food technology, agriculture, and especially childcare. UH.
So I was reading a good write up of the
study by archaeologists and science writer Christina Kilgrove on her
Forbes blog. You can go read that blog post if
you if you want to know more, but just to

(34:12):
hit some of the points from it. The site that
they're looking at here in in the study is Groad Starcevo,
which is on the bank of the Danube in Serbia,
and these artifacts, I think we're discovered sometime in the
nineteen thirties. In the nineteen thirties, there's roughly like fifty
small bone tools that were found here, and they were
made out of cow bone. They were dated back to

(34:32):
roughly eight thousand years ago or so, which would have
been during the Neolithic. And previous archaeologists had suggested, well,
maybe these little bone tools were used for scraping flour
from grinding stones, or maybe for maybe making some kind
of markings on on ceramic pottery or ceramics in general,
or maybe they were somehow used in some kind of

(34:54):
cosmetic use like applying applying pigments to the body or
face or two clothing. But the authors of this twenty
nineteen study by Stefanovitch at All argue something different. They say, no,
these tools are spoons, and that quote they were used
for feeding babies, and that marks on them can be
connected to the usual mouthing behavior meaning biting, nibbling, gnawing,

(35:17):
and pulling of children who may up to four years
of age mouth objects up to fifty times during one hour.
And they tested this by looking by doing bite mark analysis.
They were comparing marks left on these bone tools two
marks left by dental models based on the teeth of
babies and children today, and what they say is they

(35:38):
found a match. The marks on these bone tools really
made it look very clear that babies and young children
were chewing on them and that these probably were spoons
used for feeding babies. And so here I want to
read a section from kil Roves right up quote. The
discovery of feeding spoons is highly significant archaeologically. In the
Neolithic time period, there came a series of dramatic transformations

(36:01):
for human culture, a more sedentary way of life thanks
to the first plant and animal domestication. This so called
Neolithic revolution also affected the population structure. Reduced mobility, a
shift towards high calorie cereal foods, and a reduction in
the length of time that mother's breast fed their babies
led to an incredibly rapid population growth. And as she

(36:25):
notes that even though the demographic growth of humans during
the Neolithic period should be understood in a major way
in terms of what mothers and babies were doing at
the time, this area of prehistory has often been understudied,
and I think that reflects a general trend in in
the study of history and and deep prehistory is that
there's sometimes not enough attention paid to domestic life in

(36:47):
the raising of children. Yeah, yeah, more focused on what
the hunters were doing and so forth, and so Stefanovitch
and colleagues in this paper argue that quote, the increased
number of baby in the Neolithic demanded new daily life
routines not only for prehistoric parents, but for the whole community.

(37:07):
So there's this idea that maybe child rearing here became
less of something that was just going on directly between
the mother and her own infant, but became more of
a community activity where other people could pitch in with
things like feeding the babies and uh and so other.
There's some other things we can learn from physical features

(37:28):
of the spoons apart from the bite marks. One is
that these bone spoons took a lot of work to produce,
apparently experimentally, maybe around twenty five hours of labor. That
it's hard to know again always with these experimental studies,
like how exactly that would translate to two original labor
time in the Stone Age, But yeah, it's clear they
would have taken time to create. This was not just

(37:48):
like something that was basically a nature fact. It took work,
so different from like a modern plastic spoon, where oftentimes
you get it for free with the meal that you purchased,
and then you might throw it away without even using it. Yeah, yeah,
that always, Yeah, every time that happens. I don't recommend it.

(38:09):
I'm not saying that's the way to live your life,
but that's where we are as a as a disposable culture.
But anyway, another thing about these these bone spoons is
that they represent evidence of infants being weaned on new
types of food. This was new This food was new technology.
I know it's weird to think about it that way,
but I think it really was like they were being

(38:30):
weaned on new types of food. Uh. The implications are
animal milk and ground cereal grains. Again, the depressions and
these spoons are shallow, indicating that it was likely porridge
that the children were being fed here when they were
making these teeth marks on the spoons. And this also represents,
again quoting from killgrowth here, new kinds of organization of

(38:52):
baby care. Given the new easy to prepare types of gruel,
probably allowed other persons to be involved in baby be weaning.
So anyway, this makes me think about spoons and a
whole new light as like a crucial piece of technology
in the development of human culture, especially as this relates
to uh, what childcare consisted of and who could do it? Yeah,

(39:16):
because like you said, suddenly they're more babies. Uh, and
then you have this more of a like a sedendary, local,
localized lifestyle. And yeah, other people can pitch in. Uh.
And and here's the the tool that makes it possible.
Here's the here's the the culinary invention that helps make
it possible, in the form of the porridge, which which
is very much a you know, a creation you don't
find naturally occurring porridge in the wild. Yeah. So this paper,

(39:40):
I will say, really blew my mind. I will not
think about spoons the same way after this one. All right, well,
should we get into some other examples of cultural spoons
and early spoons? All right? Well, I was you know
as a as a as a vis Becca brings this up.

(40:03):
There there's an author, James Gibbs, who discussed, uh, the
Egyptian spoon, which you alluded to earlier. Earlier, the Egyptians
produced small, round bronze spoons around one thousand b C.
And these were really neat because they had they had
sharp points at the end of the stem. So on
one end of the of the spoon you have, you know,

(40:24):
the spoon, the little bowl of the spoon, and then
the other hand and there's a skewer of sorts. You
might also call it the one tie in fork. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
And but the thing is, it's kind of a mystery
what this was actually used for. So it's thought that
you you either you know, flipped your spoon around and

(40:44):
you and then use the spear to like grab bits
of meat off your plate again using it just like
a a one pronged fork or and this is neat.
It was used to extract snails. So it's for digging
around in there. Yeah, so I have to man, I'm
a big snail consumer. Uh and and never was, but
I was looking around, I was like, okay, you know,

(41:05):
scargo is a thing. It's part of French cuisine. Uh
I was. I was looking around at utensils for that,
and there are specialized utensils for snail eating for scargo,
though it seems to generally revolve around tongs and narrow
two pronged forks um. However, I looked around a little
bit more. My Amazon search results are totally jack now

(41:26):
if they're just gonna try and sell me weird or
atypical um eating utensils now, But I do see modern
seafood fork spoon combos that remind me a lot of
the Egyptian description, you know, like they're narrow with like
a little spoon on one end, and it's like a
thing that's it's more like a little shive on the

(41:46):
other that's used for digging around in um, like things
like crabs, picking crab, which is interesting because that, of
course is something that is often done with fingers. Like
fingers work really well for picking crab, if you don't
mind your fingers being stabbed by tiny pieces of shell
constantly and and just getting all nasty. Yeah, that's one

(42:07):
of the things I always feel like, Uh, I enjoy
eating crab, but whenever I do, I feel very self
conscious because I feel like I look disgusting like that
my fingertips are all covered in that juice and it's
just all over the place. Yeah, It's one of those
things that I enjoy for a little bit, and then
I'm increasingly over it because but it does make me
feel like a total hunter gatherer, you know, like I'm
just like I'm like, I'm just digging through the raw animal.

(42:31):
It's it's a kind of eating that for me. It
does not facilitate conversation at the table, you know, It's
like you don't you don't imagine like sitting around cracking
on a crab while you're also having a stimulating conversation.
It's just what's going on is between you and the crab. Well,
and then sometimes there's there's communication about the crabs. You're
talking about the search for the meat, and if you

(42:53):
have younger members at the table, it's about then helping
them acquire the meat. So I don't know, um, but
but in anyway, as far as Egyptian spoons go, I've
also read that it that spoons don't seem to have
been really in use in pre dynastic Egypt. So spoons
came with the rise of the pharaohs. So food would
have largely been consumed prior to this by hand at

(43:15):
the table, which is you know, still again a feature
of various culinary traditions. But but you do see, you know,
the rise of the Pharaohs, the rise of the spoon
um and you've see some very ornate spoons emerging as well. Well.
Something that I think emerges very early in human cooking
and culinary traditions and is still a major feature of
a lot of food today, is the is the spoon

(43:38):
that is edible where you know, a lot of cultures
focus very much on like scoopable breads that function as
a kind of spoon where you'll have like a stew
type food and then you'll have a type of flatbread
or something that used to scoop up or sop up
the stew and then shovel that into the mouth and
then you eat it as well, which is I don't
know that that's very appealing in many ways, is and

(44:00):
even that might be the cultural precursor to foods you
might not think of, is very connected to the culinary history,
like nachos with nacho cheese sauce, you know, or you
dip it in. That's that's an edible spoon, right, the
chip is I mean, in a way, it's kind of
getting to the idea of all right, we have these grains,
what can we make? What we can make porridge, and
we can make bread and then we can use the

(44:21):
bread to eat the porridge. Genius. UM like that basic motif.
You've seen a lot of different cuisines, and I love it.
I mean, I love I love ei Opian cuisine where
you used the special bread uh. And then of course
there's a lot of a lot of this in um
in various Indian cuisines as well. But yeah, I think
like you can find it pretty much everywhere. Like every
culture that has bread or some sort of bread like

(44:42):
product is going to have some sort of sopping action
going on. Now. Virusbecca spends a fair amount of time
talking about Chinese spoons, in particular the tongue chi. So
this is this is a soup spoon, and you've likely
seen one of these before if you've ever uh had
had Chinese food, said a Chinese restaurant or even other

(45:02):
Asian cuisines. It is a short it has a short,
thick handle and a deep flat bowl, and they're really
great for soups. They hold more than a traditional Western
soup spoon, and at least in my experience, I feel
like it can be more stable and it can be
more suitable for cooling, you know, for blowing on the soup.
Maybe that's just all in my mind, but that's been

(45:23):
my experience. Oh yeah, I know what you're talking about
in Resbecca's article that she goes a lot into like
this Chinese spoon versus the Western spoon, and are they
at all comparable? Are they really different things? Um? And
I just refer to you that article for more of that.
But at the point they point out that the tang
essentially means soup in this context, but in the Chinese

(45:44):
usage it's water plus lots of different things. Uh. And
it's a different apparently from a thick soup or a
soup that doesn't have anything in it, like a you know,
like a pure broth type of soup, each of which
have their own words in Mandarin. It's origin, however, and
it's exact design seem linked to North Chinese millet used

(46:05):
in kanji, which is a lot like Western porridge and gruel.
We talked about this a good bit in our Chopsticks
episode because the more like the the earlier reliance on
on millet. Uh, there's no use for chopsticks, Like, what
are you gonna do eat porridge with with chopsticks? No,
it doesn't make any sense. Uh, it's only as you
move away from that and you get more into rice

(46:26):
that you see the rise of the chopstick. Yeah. And
if you recall from uh, from our episode about chopsticks,
that the earliest evidence is that chopsticks were originally used
more as a cooking utensil than as an eating utensil. Yeah.
And I have to say, after we did that article,
I bought myself some cooking chopsticks, and I I cannot

(46:47):
go back to the old way, Like they're so useful
when um, when I'm when I'm frying things and they
need to turn little bits of say like um like
tofu cubes or or something of that nature, when they
need to turn those over in the pan, and of
course do so without being burned. I've just become to
come to really rely on those. I also really liked
them for if for situations where I dropped something down

(47:10):
into the top of the stove and I want to
get it out before it is burnt up, I can
reach down there real quick and grab them with my
cooking chopsticks. Oh nice, I mean yeah, I think having
that kind of precision is something you'll see among a
lot of I don't know cooks who are operating at
a very high level, like in in fancy restaurant kitchens,
a lot of times you will see more use of

(47:31):
tongs and and even tweezers, though the tweezer preparation, yeah,
than you would in the average home kitchen. I think
now back to to porridge, though we we've we've already
discussed you know, the basics here, but I think it
is kind of neat to think about porridge as the
patient zero for all semi liquid foods, you know, like cultures.

(47:51):
Nobody really abandons porridge and kanji. I mean, these are
things that even the world the word rule has certain connotations,
but these are all things that, if if prepared right,
can be can be excellent, and if nothing else, they
can be a comfort food. So uh, you know, they
never really go away. But then we develop all these
other things that are the porridge like right, things for

(48:12):
which the spoon makes all the sense in the world.
And then if you're taking and then again if you're
mixing things, measuring things again, it becomes increasingly important to
have the spoon at hand. All right, well, I think
maybe we need to call it there for part one,
But there's so much more interesting spoon stuff to talk about.
We've given ourselves the spoon challenge. We we dared ourselves

(48:34):
to to talk about spoons for two whole parts of
this show, and and by god, we're gonna do it.
That's right. And we already have some stuff in the
notes we didn't get to. But now we're gonna see
what else is out there. And I don't think we're
gonna be disappointed. Uh So, tune in next time as
we continue our look at the spoon, a fantastic bit
of culinary technology that has never gone away. We'll never

(48:58):
go away. Uh so. Uh yeah, tune in on Thursday.
In the meantime, if you would like to check out
other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind and even Invention,
you can head on over to the Stuff to Blow
your Mind podcast feed. That's where we'll find all this
stuff on Monday's. We do listener mail Tuesdays and Thursdays,
or core episodes Wednesdays, so when we tend to publish
the artifact, and then on Fridays we have weird ol

(49:20):
Cinema for you, uh with a vault episode on the weekends. Also,
Invention has its own podcast feed. We're no longer updating
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the Invention episode the older ones uh in one spot,
you can find it there. Just go to wherever you
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(49:40):
and subscribe. That's a great way to help us out.
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth
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(50:05):
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