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Did wildfires help spark the invention of pottery?

Summary by Phys.org
A new study suggests that a period of intense fires and landscape upheaval in the ancient southern Levant may have helped create the conditions that led Neolithic communities to discover how fire could transform clay.

4 Articles

Fire as a teacher: Heavy forest fires could have shown people in the southern Levante about 9,500 to 8,200 years ago that clay becomes permanently hard due to heat. A new study links fire traces, erosion and early ceramics to a natural kiln hypothesis. This sequence cannot be proved so far. Jerusalem (Israel). Long before people made clay vessels, they used [...] The article Ceramic production: Forest fires could have led stone age people to pot…

A new study proposes that prehistoric fires, which occurred over 9,000 years ago in the South Levant, may have been fundamental to the development of ceramics. The research, conducted by Amos Frumkin, geomorphologist of the...

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A research published in Geomorphology magazine proposes that the large fires and subsequent soil erosion that occurred more than nine thousand years ago in the southern Levant region created the environmental and visual conditions that allowed the Neolithic communities to discover the transforming properties of fire on clay. The work, [...]

·Oviedo, Spain
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Phys.org broke the news in Douglas, United Kingdom on Tuesday, September 8, 2026.
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