Who invented chopsticks in ancient China?

Da Yu is said to be the first person to use chopsticks in China

There is a folk legend in northeastern China, which says that when he was fighting against floods, Da Yu ate in the wilderness, sometimes in a hurry, waiting for the meat to boil in the pot before he could start his journey. However, when the soup boiled over and they could not eat it, they would take a branch and eat the meat or common millet (rice), which is how chopsticks first started to be used. Although the legend is not a true one, the fact that chopsticks came into being as a result of the burning of cooked food is in line with the development of human life. In the Book of Rituals, Zheng Zhi's note reads, "Coat the living creature with soil and eat it with a cannon". This is to wrap the grains in leaves and put them in the fire to be roasted. Some experts believe that this method of roasting food also promoted the formation of chopsticks. When the ancestors put the wrapped and coated grains into the fire and roasted them in the ashes, in order to make them cook evenly, they kept stirring them with tree branches, and our clever ancestors were inspired by the process of stirring the primitive popcorn, and the prototype of chopsticks gradually appeared in the hands of the forefathers over time. This is, of course, speculation, as there was no writing at the end of the Neolithic period and into the Xia Yu era, when the invention of chopsticks could not be documented, but these speculations by dietary experts are not without scientific merit. The fact that chopsticks are referred to as "chopsticks" in Han Fei Zi (韩非子, "Han Fei Zi" - Yu Lao) is another proof that chopsticks were originally made of wood and bamboo. Since wood is abundant in the north and bamboo is abundant in the south, our ancestors used local materials, so bamboo and wood are the most primitive raw materials for chopsticks in China. Xu Shen's Shuowen Jiezi (Explaining the Characters in Chinese) says that chopsticks "sound like bamboo", and the ancient saying that "chopsticks were used to hold food" and "hold food" is derived from wood, which once again proves that the earliest people used thin tree branches or bamboo as a tool for holding food. However, it is a long period of time, hundreds of years or even more, between the use of tree branches and thin bamboo to take hot food from pottery pots and the formation of chopsticks. The history of mankind is the history of evolution, with the improvement of dietary cooking methods, its food utensils also continue to develop. Primitive society, we grab food by hand, to the Neolithic era, our ancestors eat most of the steaming method, the staple food rice and beans boiled with water into a porridge, side dishes and meat boiled with water into a succulent soup, eating porridge with a dagger, from the soup with a spoon to retrieve the vegetables with a spoon is extremely inconvenient, while the chopsticks to take the leaves of the vegetables eaten with ease, so the "Rituals - Curved Rites," said "the soup of the vegetables with a hostage, the vegetables do not need to be a hostage. Zheng Xuan note "hostage, like chopsticks." From this, we can see that in the Neolithic era, soup was the mainstream, and it was very inconvenient to eat soup with a spoon, and it was even more impossible to grab the hot and thin soup with your hands, so the chopsticks became the most ideal tableware. All in all, the emergence of chopsticks was not an isolated event. As far back as the middle of the Neolithic period, daggers and spoons were found in the Yangshao culture sites. When history advanced to the late Neolithic period, human intelligence had developed to a certain extent, and living conditions had improved, eating with daggers and spoons alone could no longer be adapted to the evolution of cooking, and the chopsticks appeared in line with the trend. However, 4,000 years ago, during the Xia Dynasty, the chopsticks were still in their infancy, and after hundreds of years of continuous evolution, they were gradually formed into two small sticks of the same length longer than the tiger's mouth in the Shang and Tang Dynasties. Towards the end of the Shang Dynasty, Zhou ordered the hunting of elephants and the sawing of their tusks in order to satisfy the king's need for a luxurious and noble life. Because of the birth of the chopsticks is not recorded in history, and now only according to some experts all kinds of inferences and circumstantial evidence to trace the production of the chopsticks, but we believe that the chopsticks so appear to be the inevitable result of the historical derivation.