Pottery Dating Back To Ice Age Challenges Long-Held Views Of Life Back Then

Results from an analysis of a bit of burned dinner left in a ceramic bowl for an estimated 12,000 years has scientists re-evaluating the history of human use of ceramics and, ultimately, lifestyle.

Excavated from the Fukui Cave in southwestern Japan, researchers, led by Oliver Craig of the University of York's Department of Archaeology, demonstrated through a study of the bowl that ancient nomads did in fact use pottery despite long-held beliefs that ceramics were largely a product of agricultural communities.

What's more, by examining charred residue leftover on the inside, the scientists revealed that the pot was used for cooking fish. This discovery represents the first time researchers have been able to directly the question of why humans ever started making pots.

However, the announcement wasn't one welcomed by all: given the early dates, many Japanese archaeologists were reluctant to accept the finds as valid, according to an article published Nature's "News and Views," because it explicitly challenges the version of Japanese history laid out in two eighth-century texts. In fact, no more than a generation ago the very questioning the texts - called the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki - was deemed unacceptable by the government itself. 

This is not the first discovery, however, to challenge the history portrayed in the writings, however, and archaeologists figure it's unlikely that it will be the last.

In the mean time, researchers are continuing to find evidence that the Joman people from whom the pot came, though once thought to be primitive and aboriginal, seemed to have once been a sophisticated society, of which the pot is evidence.

Still, Craig believes there is still another aspect of the pot that may offer new insights into life during a time when, much like our own, the environment was in seemingly constant flux.

"Foragers first used pottery as a revolutionary new strategy for the processing of marine and freshwater fish but perhaps most interesting is that this fundamental adaptation emerged over a period of severe climate change," he said in a press release. The reason for this, he posits, was to make the most of "seasonal gluts or as part of elaborate celebratory feasts and could be linked to a reduction of mobility."