Who invented pot holders?

Answer 1

I answered this question years ago on ask jeeves' AnswerPoint. After a thorough but unsuccessful search for "the" answer, I responded along the following lines: With the advent of fire came cooking utensils, and these would obviously have been too hot to handle when the food was done. Pot holders appear to have been a product whose time had come, and they probably sprang up in different forms in different parts of the world at about the same time. Perhaps our early ancestors used thick leaves of some sort to cushion their hands against the heat, although some parts of the world would have had more suitable foliage than others. At some point, men (and women) learned to make cloth, and perhaps that's when they developed the idea of using several thicknesses of the cloth to provide the protection they needed. If you stop to think about it, there were probably thousands of products that sprang up in response to a need. Without an efficient system of communication, one product couldn't possibly have been marketed to the world in the way today's products are. As they say, necessity truly is the mother of invention.