Pottery invented in China to cook food and brew alcohol
30 June BBC
The oldest known samples of pottery have been unearthed in southern
China.The US archaeologists involved have determined that fragments from
a large bowl found in Xianrendong Cave, Jiangxi Province, are 20,000
years old.The discovery, published in the journal Science, is the latest
in recent years that have pushed back the invention of pottery by 10,000
years.
It is thought that the bowl was a cauldron to cook food, or possibly
to brew alcohol.Until recently, the majority view was that pottery bowls
and drink receptacles were invented after the emergence of agriculture,
when people began to stay in one place for long periods.
Part of the reasoning was that pottery items are large and breakable,
and so not a useful technology for hunter-gatherer societies that moved
from place to place in search of food.
But in the past 10 years, researchers have found instances of pottery
pre-dating agriculture.One possible reason for the invention of pottery
is that 20,000 years ago the Earth was the coldest it had been for a
million years.According to the lead researcher, Prof Ofer Bar-Yosef of
Harvard University, pottery cauldrons would have enabled people to
extract more nutrition from their food by cooking it.
"Hunter-gatherers were under pressure to get enough food," he told
BBC News."If the invention is a good one, it spreads pretty fast.
And it seems that in that part of southern China, pottery spread
among hunter-gatherers in a large area."Prof Gideon Shelach of the
Hebrew University in Jerusalem speculates that there may also have been
a social driver for the invention of pottery.
"People were gathering together in larger groups and you needed
social activities to mitigate against increased tensions," he told BBC
News.
"Maybe those potteries were used to brew alcohol.
"It used to be thought that the beginning of pottery was associated
with agriculture and sedentary lifestyle," he added."Yet here we find it
8,000 years or more before this transition. This is a very puzzling
situation."
The archaeological team estimates from fragments of the bowl that it
was 20cm high and 15-25cm in diameter.Prof Bar-Yosef is keen to discover
what these ancient people were cooking 20,000 years ago.
He believes that whatever it was it was either steamed or boiled in
the bowl."It's probably not the first wok," he said. "Cooking with oil
began later."We think it was used for cooking with water, so it is more
like a caldron".
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