This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: 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. Thousands of years before pottery became an everyday part of human life, communities in the southern Levant were living through a period of dramatic environmental change.
Hillsides burned, vegetation disappeared, soils were stripped away, and enormous quantities of clay-rich sediment washed down into valleys. According to a new study by Amos Frumkin of the Institute of Earth Sciences at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, those destructive events may also have helped inspire one of humanity's most important technological innovations: pottery. Published in Geomorphology, the study brings together evidence from ancient sediments, caves, charcoal deposits and archaeological sites to reconstruct how wildfires and erosion reshaped the southern Levant during two periods of major environmental instability.
Frumkin proposes what he calls the "natural kiln hypothesis": Neolithic communities may have learned that clay could be permanently hardened by fire after witnessing naturally baked clay produced during intense fires. The study compared two periods separated by more than 100,000 years. The first was the last interglacial period, known as MIS 5e, roughly 129,000 to 116,000 years ago.
The second was the early Holocene, between approximately 11,000 and 7,000 years ago, when farming communities were becoming increasingly established across the region. Evidence from both periods points to episodes of extensive wildfire followed by severe erosion. Tiny charcoal particles preserved in ancient lake sediments record peaks in burning, while chemical signatures preserved in cave formations indicate substantial losses of vegetation and soil.
During the early Holocene, the most intense episode appears to have occurred around 9,500–8,200 years ago. Although Neolithic and earlier people deliberately used fire on a limited scale, Frumkin argues that the geographical extent and timing of the fires point to climatic causes rather than increasing human use of fire. Once vegetation disappeared, exposed soils were vulnerable to rain and runoff.
Clay-rich terra rossa soil was swept from the hills and deposited in enormous quantities in depressions, such as the Jordan and Dead Sea valleys. Instead of simply destroying habitable land, however, this process created new environments where farming communities could flourish. Large Neolithic settlements increasingly clustered on these fertile redeposited soils.
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