I once read a book written by Canadian zoologist and author, Farley Mowatt, who spent some time living in the Arctic with a group of Inuit just after WWII (Farley Mowatt, 1952 “People of the Deer”). At the beginning of chapter VII he described a meal in which his hosts presented boiled meat and gravy in a large communal tray. They ate the meat using fingers and knives, but conveyed the ‘soup’ to their mouths by using their cupped hands. It was apparently a messy procedure as lots of the soup dripped down the front of their clothes. I was much struck by this. It had never occurred to me that any human would attempt to eat soup without a spoon, or some substitute such as a seashell. It just goes to show that you cannot take anything for granted when studying human behaviour.

Most cultures use spoons for sloshy foods. So when did people start using them? There are apparently rare examples of spoons carved from antler and ivory which date back to the later part of the Ice Age, up to 20,000 years ago. They come from Palaeolithic hunter-gatherer sites in Russia and France. Were they used for eating or serving or, as happened millennia later (think communion spoons), for religious rituals? Before the invention of pottery, how much food was cooked by boiling in liquid? There are methods of doing so, but were they used? (and how could you detect it if they were?).

There are many finds of spoons from the Neolithic, when farming and pottery were introduced, and people began to boil things in pottery vessels. Wooden spoons have been found in waterlogged sites such as the Sweet Track in the Somerset Levels, the lake villages of Egolzwil and Niederwil in Switzerland, the French lake village of Charavines, and the Danish bog of Christiansholms Mose near Copenhagen. There are ceramic spoons from Dikili Tash in Greece and bone ones from Barcin Hoyuk in Turkey.

But I think my favourite Neolithic spoons are the small bone spoons from the Balkans and Turkey which have been found to bear the tiny marks of baby’s milk teeth. They are considered to show that during the Neolithic, babies were weaned earlier than before, as their mothers could now boil up cereals to make porridge and feed it to them with a spoon. Cute!