It was a technological innovation that had a greater impact than the iPad today:pottery. Thanks to pottery, people could extract more nutrients from their food, for example through nutritious stews, they could make poisonous plants edible and convert tough fare into soft baby food. And we can now find out from those pots what eating habits the prehistoric people had.
Traditionally, the invention of pottery has been situated in the Near East, about the same time as that other great invention:agriculture. But for some time now, there has been mounting evidence that pottery was invented by hunter-gatherers in the Far East some 20,000 years ago (towards the end of the last ice age). This invention had enormous health implications and opened up new culinary possibilities.
Now, new chemistry and physics research reveals what these hunter-gatherers prepared in their jars. More importantly, this research helps us understand why these hunter-gatherers started using pottery. The results have just been published in the scientific journal Nature. Peter Jordan, who took office in February as the new director of the Arctic Center of the University of Groningen, is one of the authors.
Pottery has been widely used to prepare food and the shards of cooking pots sometimes contain remnants of the contents. Until now, archaeologists often looked at the presence or absence of milk from domesticated cattle in the pottery of Neolithic farmers. That's much easier than identifying foods collected from nature, such as wild plants, fish and land animals, from 15,000-year-old food scraps. Such a complex analysis had never been attempted on the oldest known pottery. Jordan:"We had no idea whether the fats would still be present, whether we could isolate them from the pottery and whether we could identify from which source they came."
Grease on potsherds
Jordan's colleagues at the University of York (England) managed to identify the lipids (fats) from food remains on pottery shards from Japan using gas chromatography. Fat from fish or marine mammals provides a different spectrum of lipids than, for example, fat from land animals. The lipid analysis showed that the hunter-gatherers had prepared marine animals, such as fish. In addition, the analysis showed that the fats had been heated to above 270 degrees Celsius. This not only proves that it was indeed cooking pots, but also that the fats are not a pollution, originating from the soil in which the potsherds were found.
A second technique confirmed these results:The scientists also measured stable isotopes of carbon and nitrogen in the old samples. Stable isotopes are atoms of the same element but of different weight. For example, most carbon atoms have an atomic weight of 12, but there is also a heavier variant, carbon-13. That has an extra neutron in the nucleus. Plants and animals process these isotopes in different ways, so that they get a specific isotope fingerprint that allows you to distinguish, for example, marine animals from land animals, or ruminants from non-ruminants.
Direct evidence
“The discovery we are describing is important because it is the first time we have direct evidence of how this type of very early pottery was used,” Jordan explains. "It appears that hunter-gatherers used the pottery to process fish from freshwater and saltwater." They did so in an era of rapid climate change.
The oldest pottery was made before the end of the last ice age, but its use grew explosively in the Holocene, a period when the climate was now warmer and more stable. Pottery may have been used to take full advantage of the abundance during some seasons, such as the large amount of fish available when salmon swam up a river to spawn. “Our results clarify the picture of the dynamic relationship between humans and the environment during a period of major climate change,” said Jordan.
In addition, the research shows that it is possible to analyze organic food residues on the oldest known pottery in the world. Jordan and the rest of the team are looking forward to using that technique to learn more about how prehistoric hunter-gatherers used their pottery. But they also want to find out how the art of making pottery came from East Asia via Siberia and Russia to Northern Europe.