The Unexpected Item That Turned Hunter-Gatherers Into Empire Builders | BBC Timestamp

[@BBCTimestamp]

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[@davidcattin7006]

Who else was disappointed this wasn't Philomena Cunk? ;o)

[@NoahSpurrier]

I was thinking the same thing!

[@tristanbareham5638]

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.

[@JamesJones-cx5pk]

Pottery and agriculture of vegetable plants, fruit trees and vineyards. Southern American indians used snail shells for calcium in their pottery.👍

[@RomaInvicta202]

Experimental archeology is awesome, wish I was younger ;)

[@YarrowPressburg]

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.

[@stephenlitten1789]

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

[@Rembrant65]

@@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.

[@beatricet5682]

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.

[@ShimmyD-u7g]

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.

[@penguin44ca]

And?

[@penguin44ca]

This clip is from Incredible Human Journey (2009). It's in the description. Helps to read.

[@nicklenco7311]

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.

[@obsidianjane4413]

Pottery is a key technology that enables a sedentary lifestyle. Containers are important in long term fermentation and potting of meat etc.

[@mladenmatosevic4591]

First use of clay was to make waterproof baskets to bring water to cave. Going to river alone during night for a drink was not an option.

[@jimparsons6803]

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.

[@peterkratoska4524]

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.

[@greattribulation1388]

One word, the barbecue pit.

[@loralou-djflowerdove]

That's 3 words. *(Someone had to say it.)😂😂😂

[@greattribulation1388]

@ a highlight of how absurd the answer is. It was yoke mon, a yoke!

[@peterkratoska4524]

One theory of how pottery started was leaving baskets lined with clay near a fire accidentally. Basket weaving would have been an earlier technology. Why line baskets with clay? To hold water. Also once you have pottery you can cook with is you can cook and soften food makkng it easier for young children to eat as well as older people with fewer teeth to chew. This means better survival for everyone.

[@obsidianjane4413]

Unfired clay can not hold water. It dissolves and leaks.

[@peterkratoska4524]

@@obsidianjane4413 ok maybe not water, though this is not actually my idea. Its been theorized that baskets lined with clay could have been used to store dry goods. Then having such a basket too close to a fire give the idea of hardening the clay. Which would explain why many really early clay pots have a cord like or basket like impressions. ... Basket pottery Were the first pots made by plastering inside or outside of baskets with clay or plaster and then letting the whole thing dry in the sun? The result would have been a strong container useful for storing dry goods like acorns or grains or nuts. Putting this plastered basket into a fire would burn the basket off and would produce ceramic vessel which would have "basket or cord like" imprints on the side where basked used to be... This kind of "pot" would be a very good cooking vessel for cooking acorn porridge, fish and shellfish soups and bone marrow soups. Do we have any proof that this theory could be correct? Well actually could do "The Advent and Spread of Early Pottery in East Asia: New Dates and New Considerations for the World's Earliest Ceramic Vessels" by David J. Cohen discusses recent data from North and South China, Japan, and the Russian Far East and eastern Siberia on the dating and function of early pottery during the Late Pleistocene period.

[@KarlRoyale]

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".

[@peetsnort]

Everything is about Alice and her face

[@slappy8941]

You mad?

[@ralphmcmahan2139]

I like this young lady. More with her.

[@AreHan1991]

Actually it was millett that fuelled the first civilizations of China. Rice came a bit later

[@nickp5093]

be nice to know how old that pottery fragment is

[@adrianpallis4568]

I think they dont say it because this is highly contestable and questionable. Others are saying the earliest Jomon Potteries are older but the Chinese nationalistic government has decided that China came first. What came first is a good question but the motivation is the same and the right. So it can be BBC did not want to put it in it can also be the context of this clip just mentioning it after all its a part of a bigger program.

[@critterjon4061]

Calling this a pot is kind of disingenuous as archeologists are still debating whether this was an actual pot or not

[@kapuzinergruft]

Finally a good view on the Rhine valley 😂

[@econtrolable]

I think it is amazing we learned how to reproduce. Anything after that is a bonus.

[@oltedders]

I thought it was a coprolite when she said she wasn't allowed to touch it. Lucky her.

[@MrSimonmcc]

That sounds like a load of old sh1t.

[@chrisfryer3118]

You can melt aluminium with an open fire, so hotter than 250°c.

[@kevin-e5h5t]

The lack of wide open spaces turned hunter/gatherers into Villagers. The world has been occupied, and there are now no new horizons. So lets just settle and graze on the surrounding landscape. It's that simple. Thus Agriculture was invented.

[@jeanmarc5303]

and the fact that vegetables can't run as fast as wild game .

[@Thom4ES]

Most of the land is ...desert ,polar Sahara and gobi...rocky...marsh ,..most of cananda is nearly empty> 3 folks per square. Mile....

[@petekadenz9465]

Presumably they didn’t eat white, refined rice.

[@gregroth4696]

Fertilizer changed the world not pots!

[@gorillagus3852]

It all started with Marble Cheese.

[@AaronSof]

She's so beautiful

[@MrRourk]

Liquor! Old booze is more important than people realize. To make good stuff. You have to farm. The same with ummm medicine. The good stuff requires farming.

[@NoahSpurrier]

It isn’t that hard to make a clay pot.

[@lightningspirit2166]

End the tv license fee ,its uncivilised😮

[@tawharanui5011]

To answer the title: Greed! 😮😮😮😮

[@lightningspirit2166]

People wanted to breed and not practice infanticide ,which is necesssry to maintain hunter gatherer lifestyles,..😮

[@brandman-u7i]

Makes sense. Stomach goes a long way

[@michaelanderson3096]

From this to Space X 😮

[@skyemac8]

Space X = backward.

[@jerrycratsenberg989]

This is not how it started and not how they did what they did. It was really nothing special and once you have seen a demonstration you will wonder why every archaeologist does not see it. I can explain it in words if you wish, so that you can test the method yourself. It requires nothing more than the fire that the early human beings probabkly lit every day or kept burning day and night. Every wood campfire or winter wood heating fire reaches temperature capable of creating ceramics. "Under optimal conditions, such as sufficient airflow and dry wood, temperatures in a wood-burning fire can typically range from 1100°C to 1200°" Modern humans always seem to want everything to be complicated. Embracing simplicity will almost always help find the right answer to most questions.

[@blimm2341]

Answer: Nothing. A cataclysm turned empire builders into hunter-gatherers. Same as it would today.

[@MellowYellow.]

Very true.

[@slappy8941]

Yeah I'm sure you know everything, bro. 😂😂😂

[@johnking6252]

In one shape, way or another. $$$$$$$$. hahahaha 🌎✌️🌍.

[@blimm2341]

@slappy8941 What I do know: -we have been lied to about our history, not sure why (Roman Catholic Church seems to head the charge on that one). -the geological record proves there was an event that burned 75% of the land mass approx. 12.5k years ago and there is evidence of massive amounts of a radioactive event and flooding -most ancient myths and stories (Bible included) came from real historical documents that have been purposely destroyed or lost. -the aforementioned event would create so many toxic fumes and kill so many trees that humans would not survive without technology to filter air, create oxygen, and grow food, at the minimum (or leave the planet). It would also change the way radio carbon dating works for anything older than 12.5k years based on the amount of radioactive debris geologists find. -the BOOK of Enoch is suspiciously descriptive of a master alien race with technology and how to track astrological movements - ALL of the "unexplainable" ancient structures can be explained by one simple fact: They were at least as technologically advanced as us. If that's all it takes to explain everything we find, why do they try to tell us they were hunter gatherers? Because they carbon date items they find in the areas of the only surviving structures after a cataclysm and assume thats who built them and thats how old they are. There was a project in 1989 ,I believe, where geologists took a core sample of a Giza pyramid block and it had synthetic polymers and other things in it proving it was a concrete type mix. -It's obvious something major happened, and we were forced to restart humanity. -You can come to the same conclusion if you become skeptical of everything history books say and start putting together the obvious pieces of a puzzle that really isn't that hard to solve unless you let people give you pieces that aren't really to the puzzle. The info is in the data, not speculative theories and dating methods that don't work for pre cataclysm events. PS: fossils don't form unless they are rapidly covered in a thick layer of silt, sand, water or some other substrate to bury them deep enough to not be exposed to all of the elements that promote decay of organic material. There may have been multiple events, but they find fossils of dinosaurs along with many fossils that are known to be much younger. Also, many depictions of dinosaurs living with humans exist. Couple that with stories of dragons and come to your own conclusions. We know reptiles can go dormant for long periods of hibernation and even be frozen and come back to life. Good chance a few survived in caves or frozen water during the cataclysm.

[@JamesJones-cx5pk]

Farming has never been abandoned due to a cataclysm. It may be moved with the movement of people but not forgotten.

[@AndyCutright]

Much Cunk, many host shots.

[@lightningspirit2166]

Pottery is not the main reaon why prople gave up hunter gathering....nonsense ,a potty idea😮

[@fraserconnell21]

Not pottery. Its wokery 😮😊

[@paulwhite1114]

Stupidity

[@raginald7mars408]

Tourists pretending to be Scientists

[@Boulderhighland]

Which Doctorate do you have?

[@nickp5093]

Professor Roberts is a paleopathologist. She would still be one if she was on holiday.

[@speedglass4841]

copper and bronze hoarding created empires