Wildfires May Have Sparked Pottery Craft in Levant 11,000 Years Ago

Archaeologists from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem propose that an ecological disaster in the Southern Levant approximately 11,000 years ago may have led Neolithic communities to invent pottery. A study published in the journal Geomorphology suggests that wildfires and subsequent soil erosion between 11,000 and 7,000 years ago significantly altered the region's landscape. The fires cleared vegetation from hillsides, allowing heavy rains to wash large quantities of rich terra rossa clay into the Jordan River valley and the Dead Sea basin. These fertile deposits attracted Neolithic farming communities.

Professor Amos Frumkin introduced the "natural kiln hypothesis," positing that early humans observed how intense wildfires hardened soft clay into a durable material. This observation might have inspired them to artificially fire clay for creating vessels. Analysis of the oldest pottery confirms it was made from local terra rossa soil.

"Usually, a forest fire is seen only as a disaster, but ecological upheavals can open up new materials and possibilities for people," stated Professor Frumkin. "Neolithic communities in the Jordan Valley could have seen fire transform clay near their settlements and realized this process could be replicated. If so, one of humanity's most important technologies partly arose because people learned to imitate what nature had already done."

While a similar period of widespread fires and erosion occurred 129,000 to 116,000 years ago, pottery did not emerge then. This indicates that the natural factor alone was insufficient; the development required a society with specific cognitive abilities, a settled lifestyle, and technological skills to understand and replicate the natural process.