@@JS-jh4cyActually they did so for a very long time and it worked quite well. With agriculture you can feed more people but they have to work harder and their diet is worse.
I am a potter and became fascinated with ceramics as when I was a boy I made a fire on a bed of clay not knowing what clay even was. The following day I realised when mucking about with the ash that the clay had gone hard. This got me thinking so I asked my Dad and he said ‘yea that’s how pots are made’, so that was it and I’ve been a potter all my life. Often I wonder if that’s how it all started.?
many things in humanities past,especially early days were just kinda stumbled upon so i wouldn't be surprised if they discovered it in essentially the same way you did.
Most likely an accident like that, or even observing that their normal fire pits made some ground harder than other soils, led to the earliest discoveries of making ceramics, which came before making pots for cooking (although the technology spread rapidly once ceramic pots were produced successfully). We know that a shaman from Dolne Vestonici knew that semi-dried clays shaped like animals would make spectacular explosions in bonefires about 26 thousand years ago (aka one of the first verifiable shaman who could control three elements--earth, water, and fire), so it took awhile for others to refine the process enough to make pots. It was through the pottery making process, however, that metallurgy started because, unlike the open fire they built in this video, people quickly learned how to make kilns and pot pits into which the green pottery was placed with long straws poking into the burning matter surrounding them into which the shaman or potters blew in order to make the fires hotter--thus separating natural copper in malachite, which would have been used to temper the pots, from the clay during firing, leaving slugs of raw copper in the bottom. Later, someone realized that the copper too the shape of whatever it fell on as it cooled, so someone fashioned the first mold into which the metal would fall. In this way, the first copper awls were probably produced that made sewing much easier. Eventually leading to molds large enough to hold knife shapes (possibly leading to the "sword in the stone" mythology).
@@hefruth yea sounds very plausible also having cast bronze and even forging iron I suppose there was a lot of of experimentation. Actually I am 66 and still experiment as a potter with different glazes and learn all the time. I built my first very basic kiln aged 10 and it sort of worked now I fire in a home made hybrid kiln that runs on wood,gas and charcoal. I have an electric kiln but never feels real I like to see a flame.
@@stuartbroadhurst7523 Sounds cool. I did ceramics as a project in 4H as a kid, and learned to shape glass a bit when I took a class during my doctoral work. There are several scholars out there who argue that metallurgy was discovered as a by-product of ceramic making, so I found the theory quite plausible, too, especially the more I learned about how the earliest forms of copper made a natural, silvery bronze because it often had arsenic in it naturally. It wasn't until they learned to combine it with tin that we get the more golden bronze.
I think people underestimate the simple knot. Once you tie knots, you can tie stone tools to handles and shafts. You can also make rope, and weave baskets. It might be that the idea of pots may have come about because of an attempt to make baskets waterproof by covering them with clay. An accidental high temperature fire could have set the stage for conversion from baskets to pots for some storage.
I heard that that's how they know that neanderthals had woven products like clothing and baskets and floor mats is because it left imprints on the earth and clay
Actually stone tools are usually connected to shafts using some form of glue (eg tree sap). Making rope does not require knots but rather the reverse, you need rope to make knots. Weaving isn't really a knot. It is true though that the most primitive cultures make use of rope and knots because they are so readily available and require minimal technological know how. In many locations there are tries with bark that can be removed in strips and used to tie things.
@@TimothyWhiteheadzm Ropes and baskets have to be tied off somewhere or they unravel. I used to spend time practicing whipping rope ends when I was a boy scout. And sinew was probably used to tie heavier tools to shafts. Smaller tools like arrowheads are generally glued. In general, because textiles are not generally preserved well, they do not play a big role in the history of early technological development. I suspect that such techniques long predate the oldest preserved examples.
My mom was into pottery when I was a kid. She had her own kiln. There was a bank of clean clay on the road into our property. One day my mom decided to make a pot with the clay and fire it in a campfire. She placed the pot on the edge of the fire, turning it and slowly moving it into the center of the fire. As I watched her, I had an idea of how pottery may have started. If hunter/gatherers had made a clay depression (similar to what is demonstrated in this video) to either heat water or some other liquid and used the same setup for several days to a week, the clay may have inadvertently become fired after several camp/cooking fires to the point where the now "pot" could be lifted from the dirt and carried to a new camp, saving time.
Possibly started by accident. For example, a woven bowl shaped basket was being used to scoop out or carry mud. Was discarded in a fire and when the fire died the basket material had burnt away leaving the bowl shaped baked mud. Probably wasn’t useable but would have been the spark to get people to see the potential and start experimenting.
@@atlittlefarm they're talking about burning a basket that is covered with a layer of mud. The basket forms a scaffolding for the mud. And then in the fire, the basket itself burns and leaves behind the (now hardened) mud layer in the shape of the basket.
They would have seen how clay naturally dried and hardened in the hot sun a million times. It wouldn’t take any stroke of genius to realise the heat from a fire would do the same thing quicker and in a more controlled way.
@@supplican you are mistaken. Sun dried clay is useless for holding liquids because it will dissolve again. Fire doesn't do the same thing as just drying it in the sun, it does something very different - essentially turning clay into stone. Just realising the difference is not trivial. Also, firing clay isn't faster than drying it in the sun. The opposite, actually. You can't put moist clay in the fire because it will crack or even explode. It needs to thoroughly dry first. Figuring out the technology (what type of clay to use, how to fire it so that it turns into pottery, how to make sure it doesn't crack in the process etc.) is quite complicated.
Hi Alice Roberts ! I think you have made a couple of simple mistakes here : 1/ : The temperature in a fire/ bonfire / campfire can easily reach 900 degrees ( So-called "Red heat" ) easily turning clay into usable ceramics. 2/ : Hunter-gatherers had long been using baskets to store nuts, berries etc, but needed some means of storing / carrying water. the theory I have heard and believe is that the use of wet clay liners to turn baskets into buckets may have, through some accidental fire burning down a stone-age shelter, resulted in the discovery that the (dry) clay liners therein had miraculously been turned into ceramic pots in the flames ( 900 degrees C )... Hence the sudden proliferation of pots of various shapes and sizes decorated with basket weave patterns!
I think I will take a professor's word than yours. On top of that, what she showed us is the earliest record of Chinese ceramics dating back 12000 years. Early human engineering is hard to come by, and turning clay into usable ceramics marks the beginning of something new. The level of engineering that goes into making straw baskets was not the same as ceramics.
Agriculture was the ultimate key to empire building. It allowed people to pursue other activities besides food. Once food was secure then you can dedicate resources on warfare and technology improvements and simultaneously support a larger community. Then you start expanding by taking other peoples communities and taking their stuff.
maybe the opposite is the case? first of all the population grew thanks to the intensive use of the land - at some point more land was needed - and people thought that this was the solution - until the population grew again
I disagree. The reason people settled in one area was so they could ferment plant based materials into alcoholic beverages and grow mind-altering drugs. What was available for only a week or two became available throughout the year. The domestication crops and animals came after. This view is becoming increasingly popular in the anthropological community. Anatomically modern humans have been physically unchanged for at least 250,000 years. It is only over the last 15,000 years when people slowly settled down in fortified villages. The fact is that nobody was around to record exactly when and why mankind settled in fortified villages. We are people whose genetics have evolved for hunting-gathering. We are bred to be hunter-gatherers and are living a life that works against our genetic makeup. How successful the social experiment called "civilization" turns out going forward remains to be seen.
Sorry to spoil the video, Prof. Roberts, but we've known since 1968 what turned hunter-gatherers into empire-builders: The Monolith. For confirmation, see '2001: A Space Odyssey'!
NOT FAIR !!! you cant just bring out Prof. Roberts for only 4min....i was just getting setttled ready for a good 1.5 -2 hrs of soothing Archaeolegy , as ceramicist this was such a tease!!! WE DEMAND MORE !!! lol thanks for all you do
Making and firing clay pottery is such a rewarding activity. We still fire pots in wood fires just for the sheer fun of it. Some of the most beautiful pottery is made this way (see Navajo). I have no doubt that early potters did it as much for the pleasure as the utility. One can get interesting effects by wrapping them with simple materials like seaweed before firing.
First pots where not intentionally hand built. They were incidental. Wherever we gathered there was fire. Some naturally accrued many were expanded and transported from those natural ones. The transported fires occasionally landed on top of clay deposits near water basins and rivers. The long burning fires pushed the surface of clay deposits to sintering temperatures resulting in well hardened sherds, irregular plates and occasionally bowl shapes. These early incidental pottery were found after some fires ran out and while we looked for bones of the animals we cooked in fire. Cleaned bones for primitive tools and sintered clay for gathering, cooking and preserving food and water. BTW, the very first metals were also found under the long burning fire pits on the metal rich rocks.
yeah such a hypothesis could be right, at least partially. Seems in those days, cooking was already done in earth holes which were anyhow proofed to keep water inside, by putting water and food inside the hole and adding heated stones in order to give the water a boil. Maybe they found out that holes digged in clay keep water better than other underground, or used clay instead of fur pieces or big leaves in order to make the hole water tight. When you see here how they use ground holes to form pots that comes automatically in your mind. And if you use such holes not only for cooking with water but also as fire pits, you might automatically find out that clay gets hard if there is enough heat. Yet we should admit that we have no proof for such ideas were ever reality, and also experimental archeology can not bring that proof but just give us some ideas and options about how it could have happened ... And about your BTW: yes I agree that fire might have been the source of many accidential inventions, it was surely essential for our success in survival and progress as a species. For example it also seems many people guess that the famous pine glue which was used in stone age for keeping the first stone weapons together was most probably found initially as some residue under a badly maintained wood fire ... ;-)
@@bangalorebobbel I recall from the behavioural study of species that all apparent intentional behaviours started either as reactionary responses to environmental effects or from found naturally occurring rewards. As cognitive specious we simply mimic and simplify the found and observed events. So, gathering around a hole in the ground and shaping a mound of already processed clay into a hole happened at a much later stages of that behaviour as we developed the primitive control mechanism for that process. On the BTW side of this thread, the finding of cooled molten copper and other low ( comparatively ) melting metals emanating from the rocks containing those metal-salts most likely happened the same way. Those copper rich rocks around the long burning fires eventually released some copper and cooled after pooling under or away from the fire pit. Perhaps some early human got a nasty cut on his/her toe from the rough blade looking shiny thing. And the post-bone tools era was born and early years of bronze age began. Again, abbreviating the function of making clay vessels as described and broadcasted in this documentary is arguably spreading miss information.
@@blindpilot9403 "that all apparent intentional behaviours started either as reactionary responses to environmental effects or from found naturally occurring rewards. As cognitive specious we simply mimic and simplify the found and observed events." Just to say it: I doubt that this hypothesis is the only true explanation as many species also tend to play around and to experiment, besides learning from others, and there is some good plausibility that learning new skills or uses of anything happen not only as repeated responses to repeated stimuli. Primates or some birds like craws or parrots use primitive tools, and with some experience they even tend to choose the best ones for a certain purpose. Just for example. It is also very common among different species to try to use already known skills for other uses, I remember very well the story told by a friend who observed a jungle crow who had obviously learned to dip food into water before eating (maybe in order to get rid of sand or so as it was near to the beach, or maybe in order to soften the food, who knows). He couldn't stop laughing while he told that this crow stole some of his sugar cubes when he had breakfast on his hotel balcony, and dipped these cubes into water ... I agree that accidential findings near or under fires might start further experiments, as any other accidential findings might also use to do. But I highly doubt that mimicing and simplifying is the main aspect in new inventions and skills.
idk either but....i guess wash em really good? lol idfk i don't wear rings or work with clay....not since grade school class projects that is and i don't bother thinking much beyond a decade in the past most the time,not much worth remembering.
I think Alice Roberts has a deep dark desire to encounter a hunter gatherer - Show her EXACTLY how empires truly began! Fortunately for her there are some of us left!
An open firing, such as the one shown, exposes the pots to 750-850 degrees centigrade- not 250 degrees as quoted. Probably a mistranslation. At 250 degrees the clay would not have become a ceramic.
A grass fire has quite low temperatures, but I saw some wooden poles. She told she wasn’t certain about the results, but was surprised. I don’t know the bottom limit temperature of pottery, but I read that for example ‘Swifterbant-pottery’ in the Netherlands seems to have been made at a temperature of about 350-400 centigrade. But if the cooking temperature exceeds the manufacture temperature, it will probably crack.
@@permabroeelco8155 Hi - thanks for your comment. There are four stages which can take place when a ceramic is created - dehydration, water smoking, sintering and vitrification. Dehydration involves the removal of mechanical water - this takes place up to 100 degrees. It is followed by the removal of water combined in chemical form - ie hydroxyl groups, this takes place around 500 degrees and is non reversible. Then sintering starts and this goes up to 950 (ish) and is time dependent. Then vitrification which typically takes place after 1250 and leads to stonewares. I have undertaken several hundred experimental archaeological firings and made recordings of fuels and temperatures at various points in various period based kilns. An open firing such as this can have significant temperature variability throughout its structure. The ceramics produced are particularly affected by maximum temperature and longevity in a heat environment over 800 degrees. Got these fuels and environmental
On the contrary, people didn't have time at all back then - their whole schedule was based on the weather, nature, and survival and looking for the next meal. Experimentation and innovation as we know it is a civilisational luxury that can only be done if the basics of life are met and there is a need for it. Thats why innovations took a long time to happen, and even when they did they had to be communicated which would also take many many generations
@@chumleyk I don't think they struggled to hunt or gather food at all, the same way WE don't struggle to travel to a supermarket and pick up what we need. Our struggle is that we are forced to dedicate 40 hours a week, all available light in some instances, working a job just to afford to go to the shop. I'd swap in lifestyles in an instant.
Umm... there are lots of precursors to clay pots. Ask any good survivalist. You have baskets and animal skins which can hold items, including water. You can make bowls out of wood, bone, stone, gourds, or even bark. Any of which are fine for cooking. You can also solve any need to fireproof your cooking 'pot' by simply keeping keeping the container out of direct flames (i.e. put some rocks around the fire and then the baskets or animal skins on the other side of the rocks.) This would lead to crude 'ovens' where you have raised stone slaps with the fire below. Cooking without clay pots would be trivial. Clay would probably have been used as a construction material long before pottery. Walls, rooves, etc. of huts., to line firepits, for early irrigation channels, for outdoor basins for water or food storage, etc. Using it for pots would likely evolve from these.
Yes, but you can industrialize the production of clay pots, which makes them much more readily available and requires far less input to produce, thus freeing people up for other activities. It's not the key to civilization or anything, but it helps on that path.
Pots probably predated woven baskets and most tools save for chipped stone axes and similar. People could observe mud or clay hardening and figure out both how to make it and form it without much in the way of tools. Making rope and weaving baskets likely started after as you’d need finer/sharper tools to strip fibers to make the rope or weave into baskets. Clay likely was used for building and linings but not until humans discovered agriculture and started living in a static area instead of being nomads. Clay pots would be useful for carrying food and water when traveling.
@@mmasque2052Why would pots predate woven baskets? Weaving would have been known pre-fire days as it required no tools, raw materials are trivial to get, and it required little processing time. Shelters such as lean-tos would have been made from weaving sticks, ferns, leaves, and grasses... as would bedding and clothing. You don't need any tools for this. A basket is just a hat turned upside down. Even the most crude weaving would get you something able to hold berries, eggs, grubs, etc. Pots do require tools and far more processing. Getting a wooden pot would require axes, stone pots would have required softer stones and lots of tools/time/effort, and clay would have to come after you know how to weave shelters/beddings/clothes and more importantly fire.
I think that agriculture came first as it allowed a surplus of food to be produced that then allowed others in the group to undertake other tasks such as pottery and the like.
I remember reading in the "... Wealth of Nations" by Adam Smith, that in the 18th C, the energy density of farmed rice was twice (or more) that of wheat, although it took more labour to cultivate. I wonder how quickly those ancient people improved the wild rice?
Even simple man made wood fires can produce way more than 250° Celsius (or Fahrenheit). Ember temperatures usually range between 750-1070°C (1382-1958°F) under regular burning conditions. Once you add forced air, either by blowing through a tube (bamboo for example) or use simple skin bellows the temperature can be increased even more.
Knots, Pots, Sticks, Seeds...a little mud and a little water. A little sunshine. And too many "Dad? Are we there yet?" kids making dad finally pull over.
I can imagine the hunter gatherers celebrating their success at creating the first clay-fired pot. One of the new potters turns to the others and says: "Gosh! If we can pull this one off, maybe we can finally figure out how to warp space-time."
The ‘stirrup’ is also credited as being one of the great inventions that pushed mankind forward. It allowed us to conduct warfare from horseback. But maybe that’s backwards.
As we know from Sumer and other early civilizations, the love for fermented alcoholic beverages was maybe the most important and prioritized incentive to become sedentary and create civilizatios and imperiums. We know from all ancient cultures that the use of beer, wine, fermented ananas juice, palm juice etc. was extremely important and popular, and it is even said that writing and early scripts like cuneiform scripts were invented and used for keeping inventory lists of what was used to brew. So it is maybe not the purpose of cooking food which can be done in whatever many ways also without using clay pots and also not the purpose of storing prepared foods or their raw ingredients in hardened pots instead of using egg shells, dried fruit shells or containers made out of bark or leather, but mainly the purpose of preparing, storing and transporting liquid alcoholic beverages (and some other liquid items like oil or so) which made pottery really a thing ...
@@geraldfrost4710 writing was only invented when civilizations already existed, just to mention that fact. Earliest writings so far found (in cuneiform script) were inventory lists of raw materials for brewing beer ... and before writing in scripts was invented, some seals/stamps were used for similar purposes. There are plenty of possible reasons of how early civilizations evolved. Even nomadic hunter gatherer groups came often back to the same places, and they might have found reasons to finally settle, maybe due to invention of agriculture and the need to maintain and protect their first fields. Maybe these first civilisations formed also around a religious cult, or around a trading spot, just because people became somehow sedentary near to holy places or near to trading routes/cross roads/market places. I think wars came only when civilizations were already there and people had whatever reasons to fight, most probably most often in order to defend or expand this civilization. There could be also different reasons why different civilizations were formed. Fact is, we can only formulate hypotheses but it is more or less impossible to prove which one describes what the relevant point in historic reality was.
@bangalorebobbel Fair enough. Perhaps a better definition of "civilization" is needed. Picture an ancient human. Sitting by the empty husk of the animal he'd just eaten, it starts to rain. The rain comes down harder, with hailstones mixed in! He picks up the damp hide and covers himself. The hailstones no longer sting, and even the rain is not as annoying. First clothes? Is that civilization? Or had it happened when a human fell out of a tree, still holding on to the broken branch. The lion jumped. The human swung the branch. The clumsy blow broke cat ribs, and the cat scrunched away to check wounds. Human scrambles up another tree, carefully testing branches. External weapons? Does that define civilization? Teaching your children about weapons; does that count?
This was always my understanding. There are lots of correlated factors but beer and wine, more than any other single thing are what compelled people to make the switch.
It is fun to think about how that came about. They didn't just dig a hole and start forming a clay pot. My guess is they wanted to build up a fire pit to contain the fire and noticed the clay getting hard.
Couldn't it be true that the empire builders and the hunter-gatherers were two separate groups of people with no connections? Today we still have primitive societies in the world.
Hunter gatherer's catch is sporadic, unpredictable. Farming harvest, on the other hand, must be stored, and the storage can be found and located. Attracting marauders. Therefore farming communities must spend resource on soldiers to protect the stored food. And empires were built.
In hunter-gatherer society it was the women who supplied the most calories. But since women’s contributions that have been largely ignored in archeology, the focus has always been on the success, or lack thereof, of the hunt.
We evolved as scavenger/gatherers. A lot of hunting was for animal carcasses. Bone marrow had to have been a major source of protein. Our teeth show us the we evolved completely omnivorous. Storing meat was much harder than wild wheat. Giving rise to the division of labor and civilization. Stone Age people were as smart as people today, they had their own technologies and probably more common sense than we have.today.
As someone that farmed the wildlife hit food crops hard. Deer, wild pigs, rabbits, birds all are crop depredators. They will eat all of your crops Unless you take measures to prevent it
I respectfully disagree with fired Pottery as the key. Hardened materials have their place for sure. String or the spun thread specifically was it I believe. Rope, wire, textiles, bow strings & most machinery to name a few was only possible after thread. The ability to secure one object to another with a durable fiber or carry heavy objects only comes once you have some way to share the load.
Since you showed such a clay pot being actually used to cook over a fire, I wonder if successive cooking usage would eventually make for a harder/stronger pot with repeated use? Interesting.
And who was the first to watch them and think, "hey, if I put a curved disk of that certain kind of mud in the fire while we roast our mammoth, we'll have a bowl for the gravy" ?
Beer, the actual reason 300,000 years of very successful hunter/gathering was given up for agriculture. You need a high hurdle to change a successful lifestyle to a less successful one, at least for the first few 1,000 years.
I have had a suspicion that it may have been beer. In Gobekli Tepi(sorry if I I spelled it wrong), they found bones of wild animals suggesting they were still hunting but they also find some giant carved stone bowls big enough for a human to get in. They did tests to try and find out their use, and all they can say is they had barley and water in them. I'm suspecting that the hunters had a yearly or maybe more frequent party, with beer. They, like us were so fond of beer that this kick started farming and out of that came civilisation.
When pots were invented, it enabled some of the hunter gatherers who had bountiful finds to store, and then hoard resources. Then they could exchange the extra for things from other tribes - services, adjacent resources, wives, labor, etc. Eventually you get an uneven distribution of resources creating hierarchies of power thus creating 'civilization' through dependance on those with more. In one way, amazing, in others, tragic. Some say this also made humans evolve socially away from what we would call now autistic and adhd traits (both are great for hunting and gathering) to more machiavelli ones like psychopathy etc
Millet is correct. It is an arid zone C4 plant, tough. Rice is a river valley thing, delicate C3 photosynthesis. Pottery is old like 18,000 years in the Amur basin and this location perhaps. Rice is younger than 8000 years in domesticated form.
I agree that pottery is or was a very big deal. Not only was it for cooking, but you could make images of your deities to place on a religious altar, or maybe bits of jewelry. Or for making molds or much later you might start doing your Chemistry with them. Much of Chemistry is not only having the right testing equipment, but also having the right sort of dishes. Good for them.
Pottery also led to metalworking because using that type of raku firing often the metals present in the clay come out on the surface of the fimished piece.
My father taught me knot tying. When I got to college, I had to read all kinds of explanations for cord ware pottery my freshman year. No one cited the most obvious reason - they were making it look like the baskets they previously weaved and were comfortable with. We do the same thing with various goods, especially in architecture. The speculation made me suspicious of both archaeology and anthropology. It’s always a little bit of good data, which I appreciate, followed by reams of well-intended speculation.
Maybe. What we know about the past comes from some physical evidence, stories and best guesses. This is part of the process. Thank you for sharing. Beautiful….and a puzzle, inside a conundrum, tied in a Gordian knot rolling around in a mobus loop swinging on a pendulum in a vacuum!
Check James Suzman's anthropoligical research on hunter gatherers. Cooking does not appear to create a causal relationship to empire building, but agrarianism does.
You can make pots both for cooking or just carrying around stuff you gather, even if just for one or two days. You wouldn't really know if you would find food beyond the horizon. Nonetheless, the cooking hypothesis is a really strong one for one very speacial reason: cooking something not only makes it easier to digest, but also kills bacteria and viruses. Now, now, this hypothesis does not bring enought about to convince me on the transition from hunter-gathering into farming, specially considering a farmer works more and have worse nutrition than the former.
One could argue that beer prompted humans to develop cities and civilization. One needs hops and grains for beer ... and so one needs agriculture, not hunter-gatherer techniques. And, of course, the beer provided the motivation for men (and women) to become farmers. 😋
I would have thought they had wooden pots before clay pots. You could probably make wooden pots with a stone knife. They might even just have pots that are naturally formed into a bowl shape.
Definitely incorrect about the temperatures that could be reached. If one digs a pit and fires ceramics in there, the possible temperature makes the pots glowing red hot. And even in open fires much higher temperatures can be reached as those who are mentioned in this documentary/documentation.
I spent a week there in 1988 on a 3 month trip across China and Tibet. First flush of love, still with her today. We cycled out of Yangzhou to some caves, one that pierced one of those karst towers (Moon Rock??) and was used to shelter animals and a classroom. Stunning place altogether.
Pressing the clay into a hole in the ground was very interesting, I know in the desert southwest USA the clay was pressed into a basket, and then placed into the fire, still in the basket, don’t know if it was air dried first. Thanks I found this interesting, my friend is harvesting clay from our local landscape, I would like to do this experiment.
I know that if the clay isn't allowed to air dry, ceramic objects explode in a kiln. Depending how wet the clay is this may happen with an ordinary fire. Even if you don't know the reason for the explosions, experience would probably be a teacher. Another benefit is air drying makes the clay more rigid. Less chance of making an ashtray
@@stephenlitten1789 Can confirm. Get water hot enough it will become steam and expand massively. Clay is excellent at retaining water, that's part of what makes it malleable. This means it will take a while to fully air dry. Temperature, humidity and thickness of the piece being major factors in how long.
Pots make fermentation much easier. No point to farm food if the food goes bad fast. So you want the agriculture AND ability to store food for long periods of time, esp through cold winters. You’re welcome.
i think the strory is differant... the survivers of a cataclysm moved into caves because it was all they could do after the destruction of their civilization. and were looking at the first things that were made in the effort of rebuilsding and survival. our civilization is simply what we rediscoverd to do.
Maybe it was already said but you need temps of about 700C to turn clay into ceramic. These temps are easily achieved in an open fire. The video incorrectly said the fire was 200C which certainly isn't enough to make pottery.
IANA a ceramics expert, but I did take four semesters of ceramics in college, and I don't see any advantage to forming a pot in a hole in the ground. I think that clay was first used to make baskets waterproof. Then, when it was realized that a clay-covered basket could be used in a fire to soften hard foods with hot water, it was probably also realized that fire could turn fragile clay into something more like stone. Eventually, it would be discovered that clay pots could be made without the basket substrate.
You have it backwards. Becoming settled -- allowed pots to be useful. Pots are heavy and bulky -- not suitable for hunting & gathering. SO, first came then being settled, and THEN they started using pots.
I took pottery for six years as a child. It's very easy to make a bowl without a pottery wheel by using the coil method, where you create a long sausage-like clay and you wind it around in a coil, upwards at the sides, then smooth it out. There is absolutely no need to dig a hole in the ground as a mould.
Duh. You did that because pottery has been aroud for THOUSANDS of years and someone taught you how to do it. Here we are talking about doing it for the FIRST time.
1. 1:30. Post-pottery prehistoric people (hunter-gatherers and settled agrarians) were still living in an "ancient lifestyle" for quite a long time after this period. When will history presenters learn to use terms correctly? 2. Woven baskets and other containers already existed, would continue to exist for millenia, and could often display much more impressive technical knowledge than the first pots. 3. Millet came before rice in China and there are ways to cook, store, and transport both without clay or metal pots. 4. Empire building wouldn't come until *much* later. So, this isn't *the* invention that "turned hunter-gatherers into empire builders." That is factually incorrect.
Sorry but the idea that an open fire only get to 250 degrees is ludicrous. Even without forced air the heart of a campfire can easily reach 1500 degrees F. if sustained long enough it can easily transform clay into pottery A simple slip of watered down clay can seal the pottery so it won't bleed water. The whole point though is that none of this happens in a vacuum. All of the technology has to be interwoven for true advancement to be made. This means agriculture and animal husbandry (domesticating animals) goes hand in hand with leather crafting and food preparation. Pottery skills develop out of mud and clay being used next to a fire for a variety of reasons. Focusing on a single skill and saying "this was the start of it all" is like focusing on a single pixel of a painting and saying "this is where the art began".
I was looking for a comment about the fire only reaching 250 degrees and "ludicrous" was the exact same word I would have used. A stunningly inane thing for a supposedly learned person to say.
Farming only makes sense if you have a technology to store your harvests. So pottery, or any other technology for storing foodstuffs must be a precursor to the development or evolution of farming...
basketry is enough to store dried goods - but not to protect them from rats/etc. So perhaps it's that pottery allows you to store larger quantities of food, as well as wet foods (fermentation). Maybe it's another small step along the road to the development of farming rather than something so definitive as a 'precursor'
@@andyg5606 Yes, I agree, by precursor I only meant that the availability of pottery (or some other technology to store harvests and foodstuffs) must necessary predate the evolution of farming, because farming without a way to store the harvest will not deliver any benefit... But indeed this is probably only one step in a whole progression of changes going from hunting and gathering to actual farming. Also I would not be surprised if it turns out that actually the gathering of the hunter gathering slowly and progressively evolved into trying to cultivate the more lucrative plants by the hunter gatherers so a gradual transition happened...
Having grown up in the United States, I was taught that civilization arose in the Tigris and Euphrates valleys. Only later in life did I learn that the Indus and Yellow River valleys predated "western" civilization.
They (and a couple of other sites) all started at roughly the same time, really. Focusing too much on "who came first" misses the amazing things they all did.
@@adamwu4565 Agreed, I was just idly remarking on how Euro-centric my personal education was. I'm particularly amazed that current Chinese ideography evolved directly from script carbon-dated back to the earliest Shaung Dynasty.
Native Americans in Eastern Canada, or so I have read, used birch bark containers and slowly added hot rocks to bring the temperature up and cook food. Which sounds tedious. They had pottery as a skill but apparently lost it thousands of years ago. Maybe due to the low quality of clay in the area. Maybe because they were semi-nomadic and making birch bark containers where you were was easier than carrying pots around. Regardless of all that, pottery seems hardly to have change the hunting and gathering so I doubt it was the reason for a shift in China either. Also, storing food is less about containers and more about food preparation, and having pots to store food in hardly creates the food to store in the pot. You have to be bringing in excess food first and that food needs to be something that stores well in a pot (grain is good for that). But even when you have grain in a pot you need to keep moisture and oxygen out to really store it for any time. So storage, prior to agriculture, seems like a weak use for a resource intensive container. Cooking makes a tonne of sense for pottery being an advantage (yay soup and porridge), or for the best utilization of, say, milk. But you’d still be hunting and gathering the food to put in the pot. Pots keep vermin away and are great for storing some items, but they simply do not keep food all that long on their own.
Well, being a cook, I can say that pottery would have been essential to early mankind. Why? Because you can take tough meats (or inedible parts of the animal) and use heat over time to turn them into very delicious meals. To me, that's one of the early advancements that mankind would have had to make, to be able to live in small areas and feed large populations.
@ you read the comment I made right? There is no question it was an importance step. A HUGE advancement in tech. But 100% not necessary for what you just described. Which was my point. Way easier though. Raising temperature with hot rocks must have been slow.
My guess is that the first un-fired pot makres were children at play. Just as they were likely the first wheel users, playing with stones and branches. Eventually, an adult took notice. Progress!
Low fired ceramics developed while folks were still gathering wild grains is a bit of a departure from agriculture first models. But this segment illustrates how agriculture did not spring into existence in one jump, and much of the the technology set associated with it did not depend on large populations or complex state structures. Hunter gatherers had sophisticated technologies for working with their environments and a sometimes horticultural approach to their local food supplies, gathering from specific spots for specific plants, encouraging the growth of favored food plants, and using migratory routes to get the best food supply from an area at the peak production of each season.
cooking food is practiced by all hunter-gatherers worldwide and seems to have been practiced by early humans ver a million years ago. It has, literally, nothing to do with the origins of civilizations.
Soap. Fat dripping off a haunch of meat falls into ashes, a bit of water gets involved...soap. There is our first chemistry lesson... Knot-tying, flint knapping are transformative, to an extent. But fat into soap? That's a wash-day miracle! See also roasting Malachite in a fire...blue/green flames and copper nuggets ensue. Quite a many camp-fires have been found with Malachite/copper traces.
Paleo-Indians in the Western Hemisphere could weave baskets so tightly that they could hold water. Hot rocks added to the water could make it boil and cook food.
Want to see more from this series? Check out our Incredible Human Journey playlist → ua-cam.com/play/PLPItERt69I2px46metRbLJllkdsCnpV35.html
Simple common sense, you get tired dragging your ass all over the country to get fish and meat, when you realize you can grow it
You can't go hunting and fishing every damn day and expect to have something to eat
I wrote a book, Homoexternicus, The direction of Man that explains a theory that predicts the direction of human civilization.
SOMEONE ORDER A CHINESE??
@@JS-jh4cyActually they did so for a very long time and it worked quite well. With agriculture you can feed more people but they have to work harder and their diet is worse.
I am a potter and became fascinated with ceramics as when I was a boy I made a fire on a bed of clay not knowing what clay even was. The following day I realised when mucking about with the ash that the clay had gone hard. This got me thinking so I asked my Dad and he said ‘yea that’s how pots are made’, so that was it and I’ve been a potter all my life. Often I wonder if that’s how it all started.?
cool!
many things in humanities past,especially early days were just kinda stumbled upon so i wouldn't be surprised if they discovered it in essentially the same way you did.
Most likely an accident like that, or even observing that their normal fire pits made some ground harder than other soils, led to the earliest discoveries of making ceramics, which came before making pots for cooking (although the technology spread rapidly once ceramic pots were produced successfully). We know that a shaman from Dolne Vestonici knew that semi-dried clays shaped like animals would make spectacular explosions in bonefires about 26 thousand years ago (aka one of the first verifiable shaman who could control three elements--earth, water, and fire), so it took awhile for others to refine the process enough to make pots. It was through the pottery making process, however, that metallurgy started because, unlike the open fire they built in this video, people quickly learned how to make kilns and pot pits into which the green pottery was placed with long straws poking into the burning matter surrounding them into which the shaman or potters blew in order to make the fires hotter--thus separating natural copper in malachite, which would have been used to temper the pots, from the clay during firing, leaving slugs of raw copper in the bottom. Later, someone realized that the copper too the shape of whatever it fell on as it cooled, so someone fashioned the first mold into which the metal would fall. In this way, the first copper awls were probably produced that made sewing much easier. Eventually leading to molds large enough to hold knife shapes (possibly leading to the "sword in the stone" mythology).
@@hefruth yea sounds very plausible also having cast bronze and even forging iron I suppose there was a lot of of experimentation. Actually I am 66 and still experiment as a potter with different glazes and learn all the time. I built my first very basic kiln aged 10 and it sort of worked now I fire in a home made hybrid kiln that runs on wood,gas and charcoal. I have an electric kiln but never feels real I like to see a flame.
@@stuartbroadhurst7523 Sounds cool. I did ceramics as a project in 4H as a kid, and learned to shape glass a bit when I took a class during my doctoral work. There are several scholars out there who argue that metallurgy was discovered as a by-product of ceramic making, so I found the theory quite plausible, too, especially the more I learned about how the earliest forms of copper made a natural, silvery bronze because it often had arsenic in it naturally. It wasn't until they learned to combine it with tin that we get the more golden bronze.
I think people underestimate the simple knot. Once you tie knots, you can tie stone tools to handles and shafts. You can also make rope, and weave baskets. It might be that the idea of pots may have come about because of an attempt to make baskets waterproof by covering them with clay. An accidental high temperature fire could have set the stage for conversion from baskets to pots for some storage.
I heard that that's how they know that neanderthals had woven products like clothing and baskets and floor mats is because it left imprints on the earth and clay
AND MANY UNDERESTIMATE THE DOG -- MANKINDS VERY FIRST 24/7 ALARM SYSTEM - QUITE LITERALLY - MANS BEST FRIEND
Actually stone tools are usually connected to shafts using some form of glue (eg tree sap). Making rope does not require knots but rather the reverse, you need rope to make knots. Weaving isn't really a knot. It is true though that the most primitive cultures make use of rope and knots because they are so readily available and require minimal technological know how. In many locations there are tries with bark that can be removed in strips and used to tie things.
@@jimnagel5611Don't shout. It just makes you annoying.
@@TimothyWhiteheadzm Ropes and baskets have to be tied off somewhere or they unravel. I used to spend time practicing whipping rope ends when I was a boy scout. And sinew was probably used to tie heavier tools to shafts. Smaller tools like arrowheads are generally glued.
In general, because textiles are not generally preserved well, they do not play a big role in the history of early technological development. I suspect that such techniques long predate the oldest preserved examples.
My mom was into pottery when I was a kid. She had her own kiln. There was a bank of clean clay on the road into our property. One day my mom decided to make a pot with the clay and fire it in a campfire. She placed the pot on the edge of the fire, turning it and slowly moving it into the center of the fire. As I watched her, I had an idea of how pottery may have started. If hunter/gatherers had made a clay depression (similar to what is demonstrated in this video) to either heat water or some other liquid and used the same setup for several days to a week, the clay may have inadvertently become fired after several camp/cooking fires to the point where the now "pot" could be lifted from the dirt and carried to a new camp, saving time.
Possibly started by accident. For example, a woven bowl shaped basket was being used to scoop out or carry mud. Was discarded in a fire and when the fire died the basket material had burnt away leaving the bowl shaped baked mud. Probably wasn’t useable but would have been the spark to get people to see the potential and start experimenting.
I like the idea
you've clearly never burnt anything. That would leave a pile of ash. It wouldn't burn a depression, it would do the exact opposite
@@atlittlefarm they're talking about burning a basket that is covered with a layer of mud. The basket forms a scaffolding for the mud. And then in the fire, the basket itself burns and leaves behind the (now hardened) mud layer in the shape of the basket.
They would have seen how clay naturally dried and hardened in the hot sun a million times. It wouldn’t take any stroke of genius to realise the heat from a fire would do the same thing quicker and in a more controlled way.
@@supplican you are mistaken. Sun dried clay is useless for holding liquids because it will dissolve again. Fire doesn't do the same thing as just drying it in the sun, it does something very different - essentially turning clay into stone. Just realising the difference is not trivial.
Also, firing clay isn't faster than drying it in the sun. The opposite, actually. You can't put moist clay in the fire because it will crack or even explode. It needs to thoroughly dry first.
Figuring out the technology (what type of clay to use, how to fire it so that it turns into pottery, how to make sure it doesn't crack in the process etc.) is quite complicated.
Hi Alice Roberts ! I think you have made a couple of simple mistakes here : 1/ : The temperature in a fire/ bonfire / campfire can easily reach 900 degrees ( So-called "Red heat" ) easily turning clay into usable ceramics. 2/ : Hunter-gatherers had long been using baskets to store nuts, berries etc, but needed some means of storing / carrying water. the theory I have heard and believe is that the use of wet clay liners to turn baskets into buckets may have, through some accidental fire burning down a stone-age shelter, resulted in the discovery that the (dry) clay liners therein had miraculously been turned into ceramic pots in the flames ( 900 degrees C )... Hence the sudden proliferation of pots of various shapes and sizes decorated with basket weave patterns!
Yeah , you know more than a professor and all the other professors who back up her opinions because you watched UA-cam
Why would you line a straw basket with clay, it won't hold water anyway so now you have a not-bucket that weights a ton and is not portable
How would that work if the clay wasn't dry? It would just turn the water muddy
I think I will take a professor's word than yours. On top of that, what she showed us is the earliest record of Chinese ceramics dating back 12000 years. Early human engineering is hard to come by, and turning clay into usable ceramics marks the beginning of something new. The level of engineering that goes into making straw baskets was not the same as ceramics.
@@nocraic NO! Just having worked with ceramics for 50 odd years !
Agriculture was the ultimate key to empire building. It allowed people to pursue other activities besides food. Once food was secure then you can dedicate resources on warfare and technology improvements and simultaneously support a larger community. Then you start expanding by taking other peoples communities and taking their stuff.
Now they want reparations.
maybe the opposite is the case? first of all the population grew thanks to the intensive use of the land - at some point more land was needed - and people thought that this was the solution - until the population grew again
I disagree. The reason people settled in one area was so they could ferment plant based materials into alcoholic beverages and grow mind-altering drugs. What was available for only a week or two became available throughout the year. The domestication crops and animals came after. This view is becoming increasingly popular in the anthropological community. Anatomically modern humans have been physically unchanged for at least 250,000 years. It is only over the last 15,000 years when people slowly settled down in fortified villages. The fact is that nobody was around to record exactly when and why mankind settled in fortified villages. We are people whose genetics have evolved for hunting-gathering. We are bred to be hunter-gatherers and are living a life that works against our genetic makeup. How successful the social experiment called "civilization" turns out going forward remains to be seen.
Domestication of certain animals.
@@m6smitten People, long dead, who usually get credit for this, in the Fertile Crescent, want reparations?
Sorry to spoil the video, Prof. Roberts, but we've known since 1968 what turned hunter-gatherers into empire-builders: The Monolith. For confirmation, see '2001: A Space Odyssey'!
😂😂😂Best remark!
for confirmation you have a fictional movie. that says it all right there. gmab
@@hook-x6f *documentary
Wonderful documentary that. Very informative.
True
NOT FAIR !!! you cant just bring out Prof. Roberts for only 4min....i was just getting setttled ready for a good 1.5 -2 hrs of soothing Archaeolegy , as ceramicist this was such a tease!!! WE DEMAND MORE !!! lol thanks for all you do
Who else was disappointed this wasn't Philomena Cunk? ;o)
I was thinking the same thing!
Philomena needs to interview Alice. It would be a gas.
"So smoking pot gave us civilization? That seems very hard to believe, don't you think?"
I hear that in Philomena's voice...
Actually it's a primitive toilet bowl 🥣 can build civilization without pooping. 🚽
I wasn't, someone should give us information about early humans, so all that bullsh$t about lost advanced civilization will stop.
Fascinating Alice but you forgot to mention how old this fragment was.
Your comment contains two errors.
@@siler7 Thank you for your reply. What are my two errors?
Where were educators like Professor Roberts when I was in college back in the Stone Age (1967+) ?
🤣
They were sitting next to you
Making and firing clay pottery is such a rewarding activity. We still fire pots in wood fires just for the sheer fun of it. Some of the most beautiful pottery is made this way (see Navajo). I have no doubt that early potters did it as much for the pleasure as the utility. One can get interesting effects by wrapping them with simple materials like seaweed before firing.
Dr. Alice Roberts can make even a shard of an ancient pot interesting.
Great teachers do this. They can transfer their love of a subject in ways that are meaningful, relatable and fun at the same time. It's a gift! 🎉
Really ?
I averted my eyes & listened in
@@eaglescouttrooper7969 you got probs too
@hook-x6f yes, it's called being domestically abused by mother as an infant, what's your point . . ?
First pots where not intentionally hand built. They were incidental. Wherever we gathered there was fire. Some naturally accrued many were expanded and transported from those natural ones. The transported fires occasionally landed on top of clay deposits near water basins and rivers. The long burning fires pushed the surface of clay deposits to sintering temperatures resulting in well hardened sherds, irregular plates and occasionally bowl shapes. These early incidental pottery were found after some fires ran out and while we looked for bones of the animals we cooked in fire. Cleaned bones for primitive tools and sintered clay for gathering, cooking and preserving food and water.
BTW, the very first metals were also found under the long burning fire pits on the metal rich rocks.
Interesting theory about clay but it doesnt have anything to with metals
@@JM-cf9xy True, true. Hence the BTW
yeah such a hypothesis could be right, at least partially.
Seems in those days, cooking was already done in earth holes which were anyhow proofed to keep water inside, by putting water and food inside the hole and adding heated stones in order to give the water a boil.
Maybe they found out that holes digged in clay keep water better than other underground, or used clay instead of fur pieces or big leaves in order to make the hole water tight. When you see here how they use ground holes to form pots that comes automatically in your mind.
And if you use such holes not only for cooking with water but also as fire pits, you might automatically find out that clay gets hard if there is enough heat.
Yet we should admit that we have no proof for such ideas were ever reality, and also experimental archeology can not bring that proof but just give us some ideas and options about how it could have happened ...
And about your BTW: yes I agree that fire might have been the source of many accidential inventions, it was surely essential for our success in survival and progress as a species. For example it also seems many people guess that the famous pine glue which was used in stone age for keeping the first stone weapons together was most probably found initially as some residue under a badly maintained wood fire ... ;-)
@@bangalorebobbel I recall from the behavioural study of species that all apparent intentional behaviours started either as reactionary responses to environmental effects or from found naturally occurring rewards. As cognitive specious we simply mimic and simplify the found and observed events. So, gathering around a hole in the ground and shaping a mound of already processed clay into a hole happened at a much later stages of that behaviour as we developed the primitive control mechanism for that process. On the BTW side of this thread, the finding of cooled molten copper and other low ( comparatively ) melting metals emanating from the rocks containing those metal-salts most likely happened the same way. Those copper rich rocks around the long burning fires eventually released some copper and cooled after pooling under or away from the fire pit. Perhaps some early human got a nasty cut on his/her toe from the rough blade looking shiny thing. And the post-bone tools era was born and early years of bronze age began.
Again, abbreviating the function of making clay vessels as described and broadcasted in this documentary is arguably spreading miss information.
@@blindpilot9403 "that all apparent intentional behaviours started either as reactionary responses to environmental effects or from found naturally occurring rewards. As cognitive specious we simply mimic and simplify the found and observed events."
Just to say it: I doubt that this hypothesis is the only true explanation as many species also tend to play around and to experiment, besides learning from others, and there is some good plausibility that learning new skills or uses of anything happen not only as repeated responses to repeated stimuli. Primates or some birds like craws or parrots use primitive tools, and with some experience they even tend to choose the best ones for a certain purpose. Just for example.
It is also very common among different species to try to use already known skills for other uses, I remember very well the story told by a friend who observed a jungle crow who had obviously learned to dip food into water before eating (maybe in order to get rid of sand or so as it was near to the beach, or maybe in order to soften the food, who knows). He couldn't stop laughing while he told that this crow stole some of his sugar cubes when he had breakfast on his hotel balcony, and dipped these cubes into water ...
I agree that accidential findings near or under fires might start further experiments, as any other accidential findings might also use to do. But I highly doubt that mimicing and simplifying is the main aspect in new inventions and skills.
You can mix crushed (failed) pots into the clay to prevent it from cracking. Also there's no need to form any "pits" to shape pottery.
I don't know anything about pottery, but shouldn't she have taken off her rings before working the clay?
idk either but....i guess wash em really good? lol idfk i don't wear rings or work with clay....not since grade school class projects that is and i don't bother thinking much beyond a decade in the past most the time,not much worth remembering.
I think Alice Roberts has a deep dark desire to encounter a hunter gatherer - Show her EXACTLY how empires truly began!
Fortunately for her there are some of us left!
An open firing, such as the one shown, exposes the pots to 750-850 degrees centigrade- not 250 degrees as quoted. Probably a mistranslation. At 250 degrees the clay would not have become a ceramic.
Try Celsius and not Fahrenheit.. multiple by 5. Then divide by 9 to get the Fahrenheit value.
"Degrees centigrade" is Celsius
LOL
A grass fire has quite low temperatures, but I saw some wooden poles. She told she wasn’t certain about the results, but was surprised. I don’t know the bottom limit temperature of pottery, but I read that for example ‘Swifterbant-pottery’ in the Netherlands seems to have been made at a temperature of about 350-400 centigrade. But if the cooking temperature exceeds the manufacture temperature, it will probably crack.
@@permabroeelco8155
Hi - thanks for your comment. There are four stages which can take place when a ceramic is created - dehydration, water smoking, sintering and vitrification. Dehydration involves the removal of mechanical water - this takes place up to 100 degrees. It is followed by the removal of water combined in chemical form - ie hydroxyl groups, this takes place around 500 degrees and is non reversible. Then sintering starts and this goes up to 950 (ish) and is time dependent. Then vitrification which typically takes place after 1250 and leads to stonewares. I have undertaken several hundred experimental archaeological firings and made recordings of fuels and temperatures at various points in various period based kilns. An open firing such as this can have significant temperature variability throughout its structure. The ceramics produced are particularly affected by maximum temperature and longevity in a heat environment over 800 degrees. Got these fuels and environmental
Ppl forget how much TIME ppl had back then. How much ppl could observe and experiment. And that innovations back then took hounds of years.
He means people
On the contrary, people didn't have time at all back then - their whole schedule was based on the weather, nature, and survival and looking for the next meal. Experimentation and innovation as we know it is a civilisational luxury that can only be done if the basics of life are met and there is a need for it. Thats why innovations took a long time to happen, and even when they did they had to be communicated which would also take many many generations
@@chumleyk I don't think they struggled to hunt or gather food at all, the same way WE don't struggle to travel to a supermarket and pick up what we need. Our struggle is that we are forced to dedicate 40 hours a week, all available light in some instances, working a job just to afford to go to the shop. I'd swap in lifestyles in an instant.
Ah yes, hounds of years. Or better known as dog years 🐶
@@WS_00 Cry havoc! And let slip the hounds of years!
Umm... there are lots of precursors to clay pots. Ask any good survivalist. You have baskets and animal skins which can hold items, including water. You can make bowls out of wood, bone, stone, gourds, or even bark. Any of which are fine for cooking. You can also solve any need to fireproof your cooking 'pot' by simply keeping keeping the container out of direct flames (i.e. put some rocks around the fire and then the baskets or animal skins on the other side of the rocks.) This would lead to crude 'ovens' where you have raised stone slaps with the fire below. Cooking without clay pots would be trivial.
Clay would probably have been used as a construction material long before pottery. Walls, rooves, etc. of huts., to line firepits, for early irrigation channels, for outdoor basins for water or food storage, etc. Using it for pots would likely evolve from these.
Yes, but you can industrialize the production of clay pots, which makes them much more readily available and requires far less input to produce, thus freeing people up for other activities. It's not the key to civilization or anything, but it helps on that path.
Pots probably predated woven baskets and most tools save for chipped stone axes and similar. People could observe mud or clay hardening and figure out both how to make it and form it without much in the way of tools. Making rope and weaving baskets likely started after as you’d need finer/sharper tools to strip fibers to make the rope or weave into baskets.
Clay likely was used for building and linings but not until humans discovered agriculture and started living in a static area instead of being nomads. Clay pots would be useful for carrying food and water when traveling.
@@mmasque2052Why would pots predate woven baskets? Weaving would have been known pre-fire days as it required no tools, raw materials are trivial to get, and it required little processing time. Shelters such as lean-tos would have been made from weaving sticks, ferns, leaves, and grasses... as would bedding and clothing. You don't need any tools for this. A basket is just a hat turned upside down. Even the most crude weaving would get you something able to hold berries, eggs, grubs, etc.
Pots do require tools and far more processing. Getting a wooden pot would require axes, stone pots would have required softer stones and lots of tools/time/effort, and clay would have to come after you know how to weave shelters/beddings/clothes and more importantly fire.
The beautiful Professor, charming everyone with her rosy cheeks and endless knowledge.
Pottery and agriculture of vegetable plants, fruit trees and vineyards. Southern American indians used snail shells for calcium in their pottery.👍
I think that agriculture came first as it allowed a surplus of food to be produced that then allowed others in the group to undertake other tasks such as pottery and the like.
2:54 - Common Chinese filler word "nèi ge" usually meaning "that".
Thank you my nèi ge
@RobeLifeMusic
I came to the comment section to post just this.
You beat me to it!
😂
that was actually English
I remember reading in the "... Wealth of Nations" by Adam Smith, that in the 18th C, the energy density of farmed rice was twice (or more) that of wheat, although it took more labour to cultivate. I wonder how quickly those ancient people improved the wild rice?
The answer is beer.
Beer or probably mead, honey ferments rather easily. Cheers
Imagine seeing fire for the first time? And then the feeling they had after the first was inadvertently blown out with no way to start a new fire?
Even simple man made wood fires can produce way more than 250° Celsius (or Fahrenheit). Ember temperatures usually range between 750-1070°C (1382-1958°F) under regular burning conditions. Once you add forced air, either by blowing through a tube (bamboo for example) or use simple skin bellows the temperature can be increased even more.
I really love primitive style pottery, and I fell in love with the pot you guys made.
Knots, Pots, Sticks, Seeds...a little mud and a little water. A little sunshine. And too many "Dad? Are we there yet?" kids making dad finally pull over.
I can imagine the hunter gatherers celebrating their success at creating the first clay-fired pot. One of the new potters turns to the others and says: "Gosh! If we can pull this one off, maybe we can finally figure out how to warp space-time."
Crikey, Prof Alice, you look good, full of enthusiasm and energy. Lovely to see you in action.
Experimental archeology is awesome, wish I was younger ;)
She'd make a great study partner.
I thought it was a coprolite when she said she wasn't allowed to touch it. Lucky her.
That sounds like a load of old sh1t.
@MrSimonmcc
Hard to believe, isnt it?
Is coprolite the sugar free version? Or is that copro Zero?
The ‘stirrup’ is also credited as being one of the great inventions that pushed mankind forward. It allowed us to conduct warfare from horseback. But maybe that’s backwards.
As we know from Sumer and other early civilizations, the love for fermented alcoholic beverages was maybe the most important and prioritized incentive to become sedentary and create civilizatios and imperiums. We know from all ancient cultures that the use of beer, wine, fermented ananas juice, palm juice etc. was extremely important and popular, and it is even said that writing and early scripts like cuneiform scripts were invented and used for keeping inventory lists of what was used to brew.
So it is maybe not the purpose of cooking food which can be done in whatever many ways also without using clay pots and also not the purpose of storing prepared foods or their raw ingredients in hardened pots instead of using egg shells, dried fruit shells or containers made out of bark or leather, but mainly the purpose of preparing, storing and transporting liquid alcoholic beverages (and some other liquid items like oil or so) which made pottery really a thing ...
from a story I'm writing...
There are a dozen other reasons I've come up with, but the first handful are quite droll.
@@geraldfrost4710 writing was only invented when civilizations already existed, just to mention that fact. Earliest writings so far found (in cuneiform script) were inventory lists of raw materials for brewing beer ... and before writing in scripts was invented, some seals/stamps were used for similar purposes.
There are plenty of possible reasons of how early civilizations evolved. Even nomadic hunter gatherer groups came often back to the same places, and they might have found reasons to finally settle, maybe due to invention of agriculture and the need to maintain and protect their first fields.
Maybe these first civilisations formed also around a religious cult, or around a trading spot, just because people became somehow sedentary near to holy places or near to trading routes/cross roads/market places.
I think wars came only when civilizations were already there and people had whatever reasons to fight, most probably most often in order to defend or expand this civilization.
There could be also different reasons why different civilizations were formed.
Fact is, we can only formulate hypotheses but it is more or less impossible to prove which one describes what the relevant point in historic reality was.
@bangalorebobbel Fair enough. Perhaps a better definition of "civilization" is needed.
Picture an ancient human. Sitting by the empty husk of the animal he'd just eaten, it starts to rain. The rain comes down harder, with hailstones mixed in! He picks up the damp hide and covers himself. The hailstones no longer sting, and even the rain is not as annoying.
First clothes? Is that civilization? Or had it happened when a human fell out of a tree, still holding on to the broken branch. The lion jumped. The human swung the branch. The clumsy blow broke cat ribs, and the cat scrunched away to check wounds. Human scrambles up another tree, carefully testing branches.
External weapons? Does that define civilization? Teaching your children about weapons; does that count?
This
This was always my understanding. There are lots of correlated factors but beer and wine, more than any other single thing are what compelled people to make the switch.
Pottery allowed long term storage.
THAT is what changed things.
It is fun to think about how that came about. They didn't just dig a hole and start forming a clay pot.
My guess is they wanted to build up a fire pit to contain the fire and noticed the clay getting hard.
Couldn't it be true that the empire builders and the hunter-gatherers were two separate groups of people with no connections? Today we still have primitive societies in the world.
Hunter gatherer's catch is sporadic, unpredictable.
Farming harvest, on the other hand, must be stored, and the storage can be found and located.
Attracting marauders.
Therefore farming communities must spend resource on soldiers to protect the stored food.
And empires were built.
In hunter-gatherer society it was the women who supplied the most calories. But since women’s contributions that have been largely ignored in archeology, the focus has always been on the success, or lack thereof, of the hunt.
We evolved as scavenger/gatherers. A lot of hunting was for animal carcasses. Bone marrow had to have been a major source of protein. Our teeth show us the we evolved completely omnivorous. Storing meat was much harder than wild wheat. Giving rise to the division of labor and civilization. Stone Age people were as smart as people today, they had their own technologies and probably more common sense than we have.today.
As someone that farmed the wildlife hit food crops hard. Deer, wild pigs, rabbits, birds all are crop depredators. They will eat all of your crops
Unless you take measures to prevent it
I respectfully disagree with fired Pottery as the key. Hardened materials have their place for sure. String or the spun thread specifically was it I believe. Rope, wire, textiles, bow strings & most machinery to name a few was only possible after thread. The ability to secure one object to another with a durable fiber or carry heavy objects only comes once you have some way to share the load.
Very likely used underground fires to fire the pots.
Easy to dig a small hole and bury the fire and increase the tempurature.
Not needed
Guilin is one the most beautiful places I have ever visited.
Since you showed such a clay pot being actually used to cook over a fire, I wonder if successive cooking usage would eventually make for a harder/stronger pot with repeated use? Interesting.
What's the possibility that it was children at play who made the first basic pots?
And who was the first to watch them and think, "hey, if I put a curved disk of that certain kind of mud in the fire while we roast our mammoth, we'll have a bowl for the gravy" ?
And the invention of disposable cookware, there's a literal hill in Rome built of potsheards.
Beer, the actual reason 300,000 years of very successful hunter/gathering was given up for agriculture. You need a high hurdle to change a successful lifestyle to a less successful one, at least for the first few 1,000 years.
I have had a suspicion that it may have been beer. In Gobekli Tepi(sorry if I I spelled it wrong), they found bones of wild animals suggesting they were still hunting but they also find some giant carved stone bowls big enough for a human to get in. They did tests to try and find out their use, and all they can say is they had barley and water in them. I'm suspecting that the hunters had a yearly or maybe more frequent party, with beer. They, like us were so fond of beer that this kick started farming and out of that came civilisation.
They did it for the nookie, the cookie.
When pots were invented, it enabled some of the hunter gatherers who had bountiful finds to store, and then hoard resources. Then they could exchange the extra for things from other tribes - services, adjacent resources, wives, labor, etc. Eventually you get an uneven distribution of resources creating hierarchies of power thus creating 'civilization' through dependance on those with more. In one way, amazing, in others, tragic. Some say this also made humans evolve socially away from what we would call now autistic and adhd traits (both are great for hunting and gathering) to more machiavelli ones like psychopathy etc
Actually it was millett that fuelled the first civilizations of China. Rice came a bit later
I was just reading about that when I did a search about whether ornamental Millet was edible
Nah, it was Frosted Flakes. Either that or Honey Nut Cheerios.
Millet is correct. It is an arid zone C4 plant, tough. Rice is a river valley thing, delicate C3 photosynthesis.
Pottery is old like 18,000 years in the Amur basin and this location perhaps.
Rice is younger than 8000 years in domesticated form.
Read it as “mullet” 😅
I agree that pottery is or was a very big deal. Not only was it for cooking, but you could make images of your deities to place on a religious altar, or maybe bits of jewelry. Or for making molds or much later you might start doing your Chemistry with them. Much of Chemistry is not only having the right testing equipment, but also having the right sort of dishes. Good for them.
Pottery also led to metalworking because using that type of raku firing often the metals present in the clay come out on the surface of the fimished piece.
@@peterkratoska4524 All the achievements @ Gobekli Tepe were pre-pottery.
Alice Roberts is just an awesome woman. And just keeps getting more and more so.
open fires can be hot enough to melt aluminum if you just fan/blow on them and stack logs. That's much hotter than you are suggesting...
My father taught me knot tying. When I got to college, I had to read all kinds of explanations for cord ware pottery my freshman year. No one cited the most obvious reason - they were making it look like the baskets they previously weaved and were comfortable with. We do the same thing with various goods, especially in architecture.
The speculation made me suspicious of both archaeology and anthropology. It’s always a little bit of good data, which I appreciate, followed by reams of well-intended speculation.
I think primitive technology UA-cam channel has already figured it out
Exactly what I thought we she said "they only had open fires" ... ummm. no, lady, just no.
Maybe. What we know about the past comes from some physical evidence, stories and best guesses. This is part of the process. Thank you for sharing. Beautiful….and a puzzle, inside a conundrum, tied in a Gordian knot rolling around in a mobus loop swinging on a pendulum in a vacuum!
Check James Suzman's anthropoligical research on hunter gatherers. Cooking does not appear to create a causal relationship to empire building, but agrarianism does.
Corn planted us,
Tamed cattle made us tame,
Thence hut, citadel, and kingdom came.
- Richard Wilbur
You can make pots both for cooking or just carrying around stuff you gather, even if just for one or two days. You wouldn't really know if you would find food beyond the horizon.
Nonetheless, the cooking hypothesis is a really strong one for one very speacial reason: cooking something not only makes it easier to digest, but also kills bacteria and viruses.
Now, now, this hypothesis does not bring enought about to convince me on the transition from hunter-gathering into farming, specially considering a farmer works more and have worse nutrition than the former.
One could argue that beer prompted humans to develop cities and civilization. One needs hops and grains for beer ... and so one needs agriculture, not hunter-gatherer techniques. And, of course, the beer provided the motivation for men (and women) to become farmers. 😋
The Primitive Technology channel shows how to make charcoal kilns from scratch.
The only missing factor was the knowledge that it can be done.
I'm guessing this video is around 2 decades old, she mentions a discovery in 2001. The host of the show is now in her 50s.
And?
This clip is from Incredible Human Journey (2009). It's in the description. Helps to read.
15 years.
Pot is the source of thinking for early hunters
And man! Were they creative!
I would have thought they had wooden pots before clay pots. You could probably make wooden pots with a stone knife. They might even just have pots that are naturally formed into a bowl shape.
Pam Beesly from The Office😂
No. Comet debris turned hunter gatherers into farmers, and then Empires came from there.
Definitely incorrect about the temperatures that could be reached. If one digs a pit and fires ceramics in there, the possible temperature makes the pots glowing red hot. And even in open fires much higher temperatures can be reached as those who are mentioned in this documentary/documentation.
Fastening a stone knife, or axe to a stick, and creating the compound tool/weapon, was another milestone.
I spent a week there in 1988 on a 3 month trip across China and Tibet. First flush of love, still with her today.
We cycled out of Yangzhou to some caves, one that pierced one of those karst towers (Moon Rock??) and was used to shelter animals and a classroom. Stunning place altogether.
"What turned hunter gatherers into empire builders?" Ooh ooh I know this one! It was the uh... The Musket! Right? ...
I think youtube recommended this video because it realized I was into the Tomb Raider Remaster
Good call, I don't let anyone touch my pot either.
Pressing the clay into a hole in the ground was very interesting, I know in the desert southwest USA the clay was pressed into a basket, and then placed into the fire, still in the basket, don’t know if it was air dried first. Thanks I found this interesting, my friend is harvesting clay from our local landscape, I would like to do this experiment.
I know that if the clay isn't allowed to air dry, ceramic objects explode in a kiln. Depending how wet the clay is this may happen with an ordinary fire.
Even if you don't know the reason for the explosions, experience would probably be a teacher.
Another benefit is air drying makes the clay more rigid. Less chance of making an ashtray
@@stephenlitten1789 Can confirm. Get water hot enough it will become steam and expand massively. Clay is excellent at retaining water, that's part of what makes it malleable. This means it will take a while to fully air dry. Temperature, humidity and thickness of the piece being major factors in how long.
Okay dig a hole in the back yard
That sounds like a wonderful idea especially if you could find clay that could be fired to high temperatures
@@Rembrant65there's a few key things to remember with Clay, try to squeeze out the air pockets and make it uniform thickness
Pots make fermentation much easier. No point to farm food if the food goes bad fast. So you want the agriculture AND ability to store food for long periods of time, esp through cold winters. You’re welcome.
Awesome!!! a huge leap indeed. I'm amazed how they figured out the process with heating the pots.
i think the strory is differant... the survivers of a cataclysm moved into caves because it was all they could do after the destruction of their civilization. and were looking at the first things that were made in the effort of rebuilsding and survival. our civilization is simply what we rediscoverd to do.
Maybe it was already said but you need temps of about 700C to turn clay into ceramic. These temps are easily achieved in an open fire. The video incorrectly said the fire was 200C which certainly isn't enough to make pottery.
IANA a ceramics expert, but I did take four semesters of ceramics in college, and I don't see any advantage to forming a pot in a hole in the ground. I think that clay was first used to make baskets waterproof. Then, when it was realized that a clay-covered basket could be used in a fire to soften hard foods with hot water, it was probably also realized that fire could turn fragile clay into something more like stone. Eventually, it would be discovered that clay pots could be made without the basket substrate.
you know so much i am impressed how do you do it? wow
@@hook-x6f He was there.
You have it backwards. Becoming settled -- allowed pots to be useful.
Pots are heavy and bulky -- not suitable for hunting & gathering.
SO, first came then being settled,
and THEN they started using pots.
I can tell you how pots were made before the wheel. You just pinch, pull, and slap. They still do it this way in Africa.
One word, the barbecue pit.
That's 3 words. *(Someone had to say it.)😂😂😂
@ a highlight of how absurd the answer is. It was yoke mon, a yoke!
Yes you're right the barbecue pit would have been perfect to produce some simple bowls and bisque fired clay maybe
Back when BBC was still telling the truth.
We could have gotten the idea from potholes in large rocks along rivers.
control of portable fire is what changed
I took pottery for six years as a child. It's very easy to make a bowl without a pottery wheel by using the coil method, where you create a long sausage-like clay and you wind it around in a coil, upwards at the sides, then smooth it out. There is absolutely no need to dig a hole in the ground as a mould.
Good ol coil pots, takes me back to Jr.high 😅
But people might not think of making coils. Every technique looks obvious once you know it.
Duh. You did that because pottery has been aroud for THOUSANDS of years and someone taught you how to do it. Here we are talking about doing it for the FIRST time.
1. 1:30. Post-pottery prehistoric people (hunter-gatherers and settled agrarians) were still living in an "ancient lifestyle" for quite a long time after this period. When will history presenters learn to use terms correctly?
2. Woven baskets and other containers already existed, would continue to exist for millenia, and could often display much more impressive technical knowledge than the first pots.
3. Millet came before rice in China and there are ways to cook, store, and transport both without clay or metal pots.
4. Empire building wouldn't come until *much* later. So, this isn't *the* invention that "turned hunter-gatherers into empire builders." That is factually incorrect.
Where is the full video?
Sorry but the idea that an open fire only get to 250 degrees is ludicrous. Even without forced air the heart of a campfire can easily reach 1500 degrees F. if sustained long enough it can easily transform clay into pottery A simple slip of watered down clay can seal the pottery so it won't bleed water.
The whole point though is that none of this happens in a vacuum. All of the technology has to be interwoven for true advancement to be made. This means agriculture and animal husbandry (domesticating animals) goes hand in hand with leather crafting and food preparation. Pottery skills develop out of mud and clay being used next to a fire for a variety of reasons. Focusing on a single skill and saying "this was the start of it all" is like focusing on a single pixel of a painting and saying "this is where the art began".
I was looking for a comment about the fire only reaching 250 degrees and "ludicrous" was the exact same word I would have used. A stunningly inane thing for a supposedly learned person to say.
Does she mean Celsius because Farhenheit 454 is a reality.
Farming only makes sense if you have a technology to store your harvests. So pottery, or any other technology for storing foodstuffs must be a precursor to the development or evolution of farming...
basketry is enough to store dried goods - but not to protect them from rats/etc. So perhaps it's that pottery allows you to store larger quantities of food, as well as wet foods (fermentation). Maybe it's another small step along the road to the development of farming rather than something so definitive as a 'precursor'
@@andyg5606 Yes, I agree, by precursor I only meant that the availability of pottery (or some other technology to store harvests and foodstuffs) must necessary predate the evolution of farming, because farming without a way to store the harvest will not deliver any benefit... But indeed this is probably only one step in a whole progression of changes going from hunting and gathering to actual farming. Also I would not be surprised if it turns out that actually the gathering of the hunter gathering slowly and progressively evolved into trying to cultivate the more lucrative plants by the hunter gatherers so a gradual transition happened...
Having grown up in the United States, I was taught that civilization arose in the Tigris and Euphrates valleys. Only later in life did I learn that the Indus and Yellow River valleys predated "western" civilization.
They (and a couple of other sites) all started at roughly the same time, really. Focusing too much on "who came first" misses the amazing things they all did.
@@adamwu4565 Agreed, I was just idly remarking on how Euro-centric my personal education was. I'm particularly amazed that current Chinese ideography evolved directly from script carbon-dated back to the earliest Shaung Dynasty.
Native Americans in Eastern Canada, or so I have read, used birch bark containers and slowly added hot rocks to bring the temperature up and cook food. Which sounds tedious. They had pottery as a skill but apparently lost it thousands of years ago. Maybe due to the low quality of clay in the area. Maybe because they were semi-nomadic and making birch bark containers where you were was easier than carrying pots around. Regardless of all that, pottery seems hardly to have change the hunting and gathering so I doubt it was the reason for a shift in China either. Also, storing food is less about containers and more about food preparation, and having pots to store food in hardly creates the food to store in the pot. You have to be bringing in excess food first and that food needs to be something that stores well in a pot (grain is good for that). But even when you have grain in a pot you need to keep moisture and oxygen out to really store it for any time. So storage, prior to agriculture, seems like a weak use for a resource intensive container. Cooking makes a tonne of sense for pottery being an advantage (yay soup and porridge), or for the best utilization of, say, milk. But you’d still be hunting and gathering the food to put in the pot. Pots keep vermin away and are great for storing some items, but they simply do not keep food all that long on their own.
Pottery is a key technology that enables a sedentary lifestyle. Containers are important in long term fermentation and potting of meat etc.
Well, being a cook, I can say that pottery would have been essential to early mankind. Why? Because you can take tough meats (or inedible parts of the animal) and use heat over time to turn them into very delicious meals. To me, that's one of the early advancements that mankind would have had to make, to be able to live in small areas and feed large populations.
@ you read the comment I made right?
There is no question it was an importance step. A HUGE advancement in tech. But 100% not necessary for what you just described. Which was my point.
Way easier though. Raising temperature with hot rocks must have been slow.
@@obsidianjane4413it seems like you are just saying what the video said and not reading what i wrote. Thanks for the input though.
@@nicklenco7311 What you wrote is wrong.
Those pots look amazing! You can imagine how this skill would have spread and transformed the society.
My guess is that the first un-fired pot makres were children at play. Just as they were likely the first wheel users, playing with stones and branches. Eventually, an adult took notice. Progress!
She has some straight teeth for a British gal.
Low fired ceramics developed while folks were still gathering wild grains is a bit of a departure from agriculture first models. But this segment illustrates how agriculture did not spring into existence in one jump, and much of the the technology set associated with it did not depend on large populations or complex state structures. Hunter gatherers had sophisticated technologies for working with their environments and a sometimes horticultural approach to their local food supplies, gathering from specific spots for specific plants, encouraging the growth of favored food plants, and using migratory routes to get the best food supply from an area at the peak production of each season.
I'm down with the "cooking food" theory. Human ability to "fix" our food can not be overstated as a positive evolutionary driver. Less gut more brain.
cooking food is practiced by all hunter-gatherers worldwide and seems to have been practiced by early humans ver a million years ago. It has, literally, nothing to do with the origins of civilizations.
Soap.
Fat dripping off a haunch of meat falls into ashes, a bit of water gets involved...soap.
There is our first chemistry lesson...
Knot-tying, flint knapping are transformative, to an extent.
But fat into soap?
That's a wash-day miracle!
See also roasting Malachite in a fire...blue/green flames and copper nuggets ensue.
Quite a many camp-fires have been found with Malachite/copper traces.
Call that cave The Bagging Area b/c that is definitely an unexpected item!
Paleo-Indians in the Western Hemisphere could weave baskets so tightly that they could hold water. Hot rocks added to the water could make it boil and cook food.