The power of pottery
QUESTION Which came first: agriculture or pottery? AgRICULTURE is thought to have developed between 9,000 and 12,000 years ago.
Early Neolithic villages show evidence of the ability to process grain, and the Near East is the ancient home of ancestors of wheat, barley and peas.
There’s evidence of fig cultivation in the Jordan Valley 11,300 years ago, and cereal production in syria 9,000 years ago.
It was believed that the use of pottery for storing and cooking grains tied it to the invention of agriculture, with the associated rise of settled communities.
Current evidence, however, suggests pottery predated agriculture. In 2012, pottery shards were discovered in xianrendong cave, an archaeological site 60 miles south of the Yangtze River in China — they are thought to be up to 20,000 years old.
previously, the earliest art of this type had been the pottery found at Yuchanyan cave (16,000 BC) in China’s Hunan province, the Japanese Jomon Odaiyamamoto I site (14,540 BC), the Amur River Basin pottery ( 14,300 BC) in Russia/China and the Vela spila pottery ( 15,500 BC) off Croatia.
Twenty thousand years ago was the Last glacial Maximum, when the Earth experienced the coldest climatic conditions for more than a million years.
plant and animal food would not have been easy to find, and the production of clay-fired cooking pots would have allowed people to extract maximum nutritional goodness from their food.
The xianrendong find showed signs of burning, which might back this up.
Archaeological evidence shows pottery spread within East Asia long before the advent of agriculture. Chinese hunter-gatherers may have established seasonal camps to make pots.
Sam Pugh, Cardiff. QUESTION Where are the French Eagles captured at Waterloo? FURTHER to the earlier answer, there has always been confusion over who captured the 105th French Eagle at Waterloo.
Captain Clark of the 1st Royal Dragoons kil l ed t he ensign carrying the eagle and it fell over the horse of Corporal Francis stiles, who was told to carry it back to his lines.
stiles later became an ensign and died in 1828, aged 43. He’s buried in Clerkenwell, London.
Captain Clark was awarded the Companion of the Order of the Bath. some say Clark captured the eagle, others say it was stiles.
Alan Cooper, Hailsham, E. Sussex.