Humans have been aware of ice for as long as there have been humans in ice.

However, using ice outside of winter has always been a huge challenge,

but that didn't stop people from trying to harness ice and to use ice even when it was out of season.

It wasn't until relatively recently, historically speaking,

that ice became something that most people could just take for granted.

Learn more about ice and how humans managed to make it and store it before they had electricity

on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Ice is a very strange substance as far as humanity's relationship with it goes.

It's extremely common and comes from one of the cheapest substances on the planet.

Yet for much of early humanity's development, we rarely or never experienced it.

When the first proto-humans were in Africa, they probably would have encountered it rarely,

either during extreme weather events or if they were at sufficiently high

altitude. As humans left Africa they mostly stuck to tropical areas but

eventually they migrated further north in Asia and Europe. There they would have

encountered seasonal ice and potentially year-round ice on

mountain tops. Eventually they discovered the properties of this unique substance. It would be

cold to the touch and in fact could numb your body if you touched it too long. It could make

beverages taste better and make them more refreshing and it could preserve food

longer. But most of all it would disappear if you tried to preserve it or take it to a

warmer place. The ability to

collect and preserve ice goes back much farther than most people realize. We know

that at least as early as the 4th century BC, the ancient Persians had figured out how to preserve ice

year round in the desert. They created a building called a Yachchol which was the

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