• ivanafterall
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    507 months ago

    Honey, you remember that friend of yours who always talked about melting horses? Apparently, he’s some sort of billionaire now and I’m leaving you for him.

    • DessertStorms
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      107 months ago

      Nor soap (nowadays it’s just plain old melted animal fats, but at several points in history human fat was used too!)

        • DessertStorms
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          66 months ago

          I didn’t mean the soap was just fat, but that the fat in it was just from animals.

          • @[email protected]
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            6 months ago

            It’s almost inevitable to discover once we started using fire to cook. The fat would drip into the ashes of the fires. Over time, and with a bit of rain they would have discovered some pretty crude soap. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find that hunter-gatherer societies routinely gathered the soap from the previous year they had been there in any given area.

            They probably thought it was magic, because why the heck would fat and ashes cause that, but it’s a neat little double soluble molecule.

            • ivanafterall
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              16 months ago

              I certainly wouldn’t have thought to rub it all over my body.

              • @[email protected]
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                26 months ago

                They didn’t either. Bathing regularly seems to be a fairly modern concept for us, but we have found evidence that they used it to wash food containers, furs, and clothing.

  • PorkSoda
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    236 months ago

    All jokes aside, I imagine cremating horses was the preferred method of disposal. I’m sure no one wanted to dig holes big enough to bury a horse. I wonder if that’s how it was discovered.

  • @[email protected]
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    206 months ago

    See also: the first guy who looked at an udder and thought “I wonder what will happen if I yank on those bad boys JUUUST right” or “look at that calf just sucking away like it owns the world! I want some of THAT action!”

    • @[email protected]
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      206 months ago

      Women have tiddies we can suck on and we know milk comes from there. Seeing a calf nurse can have us assume we can get milk that way. A + B means we can get milk from bovine that way.

      • @[email protected]
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        16 months ago

        Yeah, but what would make him WANT that milk? It’s not like any humans except babies had been drinking milk until then and cows, though adorable, are not the cleanest animals…

        • @[email protected]
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          6 months ago

          Because you are desperate and hungry and don’t want to kill your cow. Milk is a great way to turn inedible grasses into protein.

          People are a lot of things during famines. The ones who lived were the ones who happened to discover new foods.

        • @[email protected]
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          36 months ago

          Wasn’t this the nomadic people who did this with their goats or something? And before that’s lactose tolerance wasn’t that common. So most of them probably had stomach aches a lot until it became common over generations

          • @[email protected]
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            06 months ago

            most of them probably had stomach aches a lot until it became common over generations

            Sorta like "Reality’ TV?

        • @[email protected]
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          36 months ago

          Aside from hunger, humans weren’t insanely concerned with dirt. If it was bad or rancid they’d stay away, but remember this was the time before washing hands.

    • @[email protected]
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      76 months ago

      Beer makes even less sense. How thirsty do you have to be to look at a container of rotten wheat water, to decide that maybe that water is clean enough to drink?

      Wine at least makes a bit of sense since I’m pretty sure that vinegar predates wine. Beer though? Nope.

      • @[email protected]
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        46 months ago

        One of the theories on alcohol is mead (honey wine) was the first alcohol. Supposedly hunters would throw a bit of honey into their water skins and go hunting. When they came back, they might not have finished it and when used again, it was alcoholic. Eventually they noticed the effect and enjoyed it.

        I’m sure after that much experimentation was had on different carbohydrates.

        Beer seems hard though. You have to boil it just right to make it right, before you even start fermentation.

  • @[email protected]
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    47 months ago

    We could also try it with some rocks, maybe some shiny hard stuff will come out that we can use to make tools.

    I bet something happens if we try melting sand too, perhaps some sort of other hard stuff you can see through.