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Some people may doubt that this conclusion is quite similar to the legend of Yu the Great. Actually, Yu the Great was the founder of the Xia Dynasty, the first Dynasty in the Chinese history which symbolized the end of the ancient times. Hence, according to the conclusion in the former paragraph, chopsticks most probably had appeared before the Xia Dynasty, but not until the foundation of the Xia Dynasty was the use of chopsticks commonly realized by the public because of better communications and understandings.
2.2 The Origins of Knives and Forks as the Representative of Western Tableware
The information that can be found on the origins of knives and forks is much less than that of chopsticks. As to the knives, it was recorded in Renaat’s paper that 1.5 billion years ago, humans began to regard knives made of stone as a tool to cut off the baked meat as well as to protect themselves from dangers (Morel 42). It was also marked that, in early times only knives made of stone and bone were used not only as dinning utensils but also as tools to cut off the fresh mutton and beef before cooking (Cai 58). From the above records it can be concluded that people commonly believe that knives are invented long before. People may imagine that in the ancient times, even before the appearance of fire, it was of enormous difficulty for humans to eat fresh meat without any tools. Therefore, knives were crucial to people’s life at that time. Owing to the shortage of written records, it was hard to exactly figure out when knives were invented. Nevertheless, what can be ensured was that knives were firstly used as either weapons or tableware. In later time, because of the development of human’s civilizations, people began to invent kinds of knives respectively for the use of eating and fighting.
It is widely thought that the invention of forks is later than that of knives, which is relatively believable, for that forks depend on knives. To be specific, if there were no knives cutting off the food, forks could not have been used to pick up the sliced food. Hence forks were invented after the use of knives. Considering the origin of forks, it was marked that in about the eleventh century, a princess in the country of Byzantium ever used forks to pick up the sticky candies, which was regarded as the earliest record about forks (Qiu 39). Although there were no specific records on the forks before the eleventh century, it could not be definitely concluded that forks originated from the country of Byzantium in eleventh century. It can only be concluded that forks may appear at least before the eleventh century.
2.3 The Interaction Between Origins and Cultures