Tag: #FOWC

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I is for Ice Cream


“Ancient” American ice house,, Louisiana October 1938, Library of Congress photo by Russell Lee.

Nearly five years ago, I wrote a version of this post after reading Who Ate the First Oyster?, Cody Cassidy’s marvelous book, which chronicles stories of individual firsts. My approach focuses globally rather than on firsts. So far we have journeyed around the world to see what humanity has created, from Siberia to Chile to Australia to Germany to Egypt and to the Fertile Crescent.

I’ve leaned into anthropology and archaeology fairly heavily, although today’s journey will be more standard history. For this particular topic, we need to stretch the boundaries of “ancient” forward a little, tiptoeing into the Middle Ages, to understand this marvelous creation. Really, it’s why probably humans learned to control fire, stand up, carry our babies with us, and build giant pyramids. We needed to develop knowledge and skills to invent Ice Cream.

The road to inventing ice cream was a bit circuitous and meandered from the ziggurat-days of Ur to the sophisticated empires of the Far East and back to Fertile Crescent. The most important part of the invention happened near the beginning. Because to make ice cream, you needed ice.

Lemon gelato in Venice. Photo by kajmeister.
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H is for House

A mammoth bone house displayed in a museum in the Ukraine. Humans get creative when it comes to shelters.

Home is where the hearth is. At least it was for thousands of years, when humans needed fire and shelter to stay alive. The tricky part is exactly how long ago this started, exactly or even in a rough estimate or even was it before they lost their fur and became hominids?

A house was pretty easy to define when I was six and learned “how” to draw them. Peaked roof, two windows in front, a door with a doorknob, and probably a chimney. I always drew a house with a chimney, after examples I’d seen, even though I didn’t have a fireplace until I was about twenty, and then we rarely used it, once I learned I had to clean it. But it turns out house=home=shelter is up for debate from the archaeologists, especially as they vie to see which came first. They did all seem to have fireplaces.

The last few days, my topics of ancient games, calendars, and fashion were on comparatively sophisticated inventions. Dates of 3000 BCE were modern compared with today’s topic. Housing is such a fundamental need that its origins go back much further other inventions, almost to the beginning of the human timeline. As usual, three angles of approach:

  1. What does “house” mean?
  2. When and where in the world was “housing” first created
  3. What other aspects of humanity are revealed by knowing #1 and #2?
We’re gonna need a lot more mammoth bones. Tauride Palace in St. Petersburg, photo by Godot13.
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G is for Games

Ancient Egyptian marbles, @2500 BCE. Similar, small polished rocks (marbles) have been found in the Indus Valley, Mesopotamia, Mesoamerica, i.e. wherever children existed. Photo by Rob Koopman at Leiden Museum.

Play is instinctive. Even without Nerf guns, Xboxes, or Hungry, Hungry Hippos, children will play. Young creatures from every species know how to splash their sister at the watering hole; every little brother will pounce on the older one to start a game of chase. Peek-a-boo must be universal. Although what about amoebas? Do amoeba children play peek–a-boo?

Before I go too far down the rabbit hole of biology, let’s just stick to play, specifically ancient toys and games. Strangely enough, academics hadn’t given much thought to play until a few years ago, especially in archaeological digs. Hstorian Philippe Arles actually put forth the theory that in the past children didn’t play, that they were effectively “mini-adults,” because there was too much to do and high infant mortality rates made their parents unwilling to invest in their childhoods–Arles sounds like a guy without children to me. For a long time, though, when archaeologists found a Stone Age figurine or a bit of broken pottery, even in a child’s burial site, they called the former a religious fetish and the latter trash. But those could have been dolls and action figures; they could have been game pieces.

The idea of childhood play wasn’t invented in the 20th century. Plenty of classical Egyptian, Greek, and Roman artwork includes children playing. We can let the academic journal papers debate whether the tiny horse with wheels was for a religious ceremony or a giggling child. For this purposes, let’s call them toys.

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