For decades, researchers believed pottery arrived in Europe with agriculture and domesticated animals, as part of a “package” of technologies that spread northward from Anatolia beginning about 9000 years ago. But a new study tells a different story.
Broken, charred and still crusted with nearly 8000-year-old food, the remnants of ancient pottery found across northern Eurasia wouldn’t be mistaken for fine china. But the advent of this durable technology—used to cook and store abundant plant and animal resources—was a huge step forward for hunter-gatherers in this part of the globe. It was also home-grown, new research suggests.
Fat residues revealed whether meat from ruminants like deer or cattle was on the menu, or whether people were boiling fish soup, pork, or plants instead. And comparing decorations and pot shapes helped the team map how pottery trends spread from community to community. Burned crusts of food on a pot used by early hunter-gatherers in northeastern Europe about 7500 years agoLucy Kubiak-Martens, an archaeobotanist at BIAX Consult, a commercial archaeology company in the Netherlands who was not involved with the paper, agrees with that interpretation. “It seems the knowledge traveled, not people,” she says.
“Hunter-gatherer societies are not backwards or simple, but were innovators in their own right,” Piezonka says.
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