I have an (alleged) Chinese Neolithic clay cooking pot. Round bottomed (so it won’t stand up on a flat surface) but with three stubby “feet” halfway up, the idea being, apparently, that it will stay stable and cook evenly every time whatever angle it’s placed at amongst the embers. It does. It’s one of those objects from antiquity (or possibly a modern copy) that strikes you as really beautiful because it’s so perfectly and simply designed for it’s function, without an atom of excess features.
It heats tomato soup beautifully when placed on a gas ring. It’s not fired or glazed yet it doesn’t break, despite getting red hot. Not sure if it’s supposed to do that, but it does.
To me, the implication seems to be that people would have had the ability to produce hot water, and/or to cook using pots since the year dot. Adding hot stones wouldn’t seem to be as efficient… Except, if large volumes were needed (to bathe, or to cook something large.) Bathing sounds right, as it’s so simple (you could wallow all day, even in winter, so long as your hamster kept adding rocks – what utter luxury, available to all, in a tough damp primitive world). Large-scale cooking sounds less convincing – if you had a whole deer, why wouldn’t you cut it up, or roast it over the fire?
