The problem with pottery is that early archeology found mountains of
the stuff associated with settled living and made the natural
assumption that this was when it was all invented. It made way more
sense that hunters would soon learn to work with clay and would find
some way to exploit it.
Even using clay to line a basket and simply allowing it to cure could
provide a small vessel able to hold water. Hot stones would then do
the heating and the clay itself would never exceed boiling
temperatures. This sample fits that minimalist model. Of course,
all peoples were transitory on the landscape and we simply do not get
meaningful middens unless it is at the sea shore. Unfortunately, all
those were inundated 13,000 years ago anyway and such as we now have
are recent.
Besides, humanity and its predecessors have been using fire for a
million years and a water tight container is critical in such cooking
if only because much game meat must be cooked for two hours in a stew
pot to ease consumption. That is why we lost our powerful jaws.
What was new during the agricultural expansion was fired clay. That
took substantial manpower organization in order to produce the
charcoal supply. And of course, fired clay will not breakdown so
easily either. Thus the mountains of shards.
Oldest pottery
hints at cooking's ice-age origins
19:00 28 June 2012 by Michael
Marshall
Did a deep freeze spur
our ancestors to get cooking? The discovery that the oldest pots in
the world were made in China around the time of the Last Glacial
Maximum suggests that might be the case.
Hundreds of fragments
of pottery have been found since the 1960s inXianrendong cave in
south-east China
Ofer Bar-Yosef of
Harvard University and colleagues excavated the cave again in
2009 and, for the first time, used radiocarbon dating to work
out the age of the layers where the pottery shards were found. The
oldest ones turned out to be between 19,000 and 20,000 years old.
That is thousands of
years before people began farming some 12,000 years ago –
suggesting that the pots were made by hunter-gatherers, which is
contrary to previous thinking. "The making of pottery is not
necessarily related to agriculture," says Bar-Yosef.
World's first stew
Bar-Yosef thinks
the shards are the remains of crude pots and bowls, probably about 20
centimetres across. "They were poorly fired and easily
breakable," he says. Their outer surfaces carry scorch marks and
small amounts of soot, so Bar-Yosef thinks they were used for
cooking.
His dating data helps
to locate the oldest potters, but humans had been manipulating clay
into figurines for many years by then. The Venus of Dolní Věstonice,
a small statuette of a naked woman found in what is now the Czech
Republic is estimated to be about 30,000 years old.
What prompted Chinese
hunter-gatherers to start cooking food 20,000 years ago? Bar-Yosef
points out that, at the time, Earth was in the clutches of the
Last Glacial Maximum, the height of the last ice age.
The extreme cold would
have caused food shortages. Cooked food yields more energy than
raw food, so throwing their meals on the fire could have helped
people to survive. It takes some form of stress for species to
undergo major changes, says Bar-Yosef.
A later cold
period, the Younger Dryas starting about 12,800 years ago,
could have forced people to start farming (Current Anthropology, DOI:
10.1086/659784). Because much of Eurasia was colonised by then,
people couldn't escape food shortages by moving to a new area. The
only option was to start growing crops.
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