Still, you do not have to have had a more than average relationship with a spoon to realise just how vital a piece of technology they have become in the modern high-tech world. However, back in the days when dining etiquette demanded people eating soup must use a fork, it became apparent that cutlery had become, rather than the boon people had first hoped, a traumatic ritual of propriety and manners that had most people baffled.
Of course, once the days of just gnawing off as much bison as your jaws could manage had passed, the invention of the flint knife had introduced the notion of bite-sized portions. Unfortunately, because of the sharpness of the flint tools, the curse of wafer-thin meat slices was already upon on our ancient ancestors as they gathered in their caves for a buffet supper.
However, the flint spoon and the flint fork were not very successful at all, and the flint spatula never got past its first round of consumer-testing before being unceremoniously withdrawn from the market.
However, at about the same time, the big thing of the moment, especially in the domestic market was the secret of fire. Consequently, any utensil invented in that era had to be still usable with hot food, sometimes flaming (literally) hot food. Therefore, any utensil based around wood technology, including the perennial stand-by of the time – the pointy-stick, tended to have a habit of bursting into flames, thus rendering the whole eating experience somewhat unsatisfactory, especially to those with either burnt lips or fingers.
As luck would have it though, someone with suddenly rather hot fingers flung one of those flaming hot sticks out of the cave into the snow, where it rapidly cooled down, just in time for a passing mammoth to step on one end of it, flattening it out. Thus was the spoon – as we know it – born; and not long after, civilisation and the first tentative sit-com scripts came along, bringing into being the modern world as we know it.
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