A Case of Convergent Evolution:
The History of the Jadle

To be invented once, an artefact only needs to tickle the imagination of a single person with the resources to create or describe it. But if invented multiple times and in multiple eras, an artefact starts to take on the cast of an item of necessity - an archetype even - made inevitable by the needs, desires and physiology of our very personhood.

The boats which bore the first humans to Australia 40,000 years ago were not the descendants of those used in the Aegean Sea some 90,000 years before, any more than they were the intellectual predecessors of the Pesse canoes, found in the Netherlands. Rather, this example of convergent evolution speaks to the common pursuit of humanity to travel the seas, go over the horizon and get nipped in the behind by sharks.

So too with the jadle....

Perhaps the most notorious appearance of the jadle in history occurred sometime in the 4th Century. Faced with a decline in trust between the Roman centre of power and its increasingly affluent eastern reaches, leading senators began advocating for the creation of a shared symbol of the empire, one that invoked the strong religious traditions of Egypt (as represented by the canopic jars used to store the organs of Kings) and the bacchanalian commitment to pleasure in Rome (represented by the wine ladle).

Unfortunately, because the concatenation of the Egyptian hieroglyph for jar and simpulum or ladle in Latin was considered both unwritable and unpronounceable, it had the reverse effect, contributing to the sense that the East-West divide of the empire’s latter years was insuperable.

Some leading historians believe that the abortive attempt to invent a jadle was therefore ultimately responsible for the break-up of the Roman empire. “Insuperable is not etymologically related to insouperable,” added Mary Beard, when reached for comment, “although of course you can’t put soup in a jadle.”
Possibly the oldest example of the invention of the jadle dates back to prehistoric times. Found in the vicinity of the renowned Löwenmensch ivory figurine were shards of what some archaeologists believe may have been a jadle. “When you look at the piece, it is clearly the underside of a jadle,” comments David Starkey, “really no other explanation is conceivable. My assumption is that the jadle was made as a receptacle for the lion-man but broke apart, having somewhat lower utility than they had expected.” Interestingly, other historians working on this fundamental problem have considered the idea that if the item predates both jars and ladles then in fact it is a progenitor artefact rather than an descendent. They suggest that to avoid confusion, jars should be renamed as jajas, whilst all ladles could simply be called “Jeff”.
Renaissance man, master painter, sculptor, rationalist and father of material science, Leonardo Da Vinci was also a highly creative inventor. Strangely enough, recent scholarship has also indicated that he struggled for many years with the invention of the jadle. In this series of sketches, we see his frustration with the traditional jar model, an object so prosaic and utilitarian that once you put liquid into it, it just stays there, requiring complex contraptions and piping to get the liquid to come out again.

In another attempt, the handle was too far over to one side, making it impossible to get your hands covered in liquid whilst pouring however much you may want to. After months of trying and thousands of sketches, he became so frustrated with this object that he tried to shoot it with a crossbow - as can be seen in the image to the right.

All of which history and prehistory brings us to the most famous contemporary proponent of jadles. Still best-known for his shards, James McNicoll has focussed much of his pottiness on jadles. He believes that all his creations need to be multifunctional. “The shards have many distinct uses including delineating the boundaries of improvised backyard cricket tournaments and mildly inconveniencing wombats intent on raiding a carrot patch,” explained the long-time Oxford resident in a rare interview. Asked for comment about the presumed multiple functions of his jadles he declined to come to the phone, despite his wife’s best efforts to tackle him to the floor.


Copyright waived. Other parties encouraged to accept responsibility and ownership. Thanks, The McNickids