Long before pottery became a common art form, the southern Levant underwent major environmental changes that stripped vegetation from hillsides and caused large amounts of clay-rich soil to accumulate in the valleys.
Now, a new study led by Amos Frumkin at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem suggests this process may have exposed Neolithic communities to the effects of intense fire on clay. Frumkin refers to this as the natural kiln hypothesis.
The study, published in Geomorphology, examined evidence from ancient sediments, cave deposits, and charcoal remains and identified two separate periods when wildfire and erosion impacted the area.
The two periods are separated by more than 100,000 years; the first of them was the last interglacial, lasting from about 129,000 to 116,000 years ago. The second was the early Holocene, which lasted from about 11,000 to 7,000 years ago, a period that corresponds with the establishment of farming communities in the region. The most intense burning occurred between 9,500 and 8,200 years ago.
Both periods left similar evidence. Small charcoal particles in ancient lake sediments indicate periods of increased burning. Chemical signatures in cave formations show the loss of vegetation and soil that followed. Frumkin notes that the scale and timing of the fires point toward climatic causes rather than increased human use of fire, although people in the region already used fire on a limited scale.
Once the vegetation disappeared, the hillsides could no longer retain soil when it rained. The terra rossa clay, therefore, washed down the slopes and collected in low-lying areas like the Jordan and Dead Sea valleys, building up in thick layers. Since this redeposited clay was very fertile, Neolithic settlements tended to cluster in these areas.
Pottery appeared in the region during the same time period. Earlier petrographic studies show that local redeposited terra rossa clay provided the material for Yarmukian pottery from the Jordan Valley, the same material that erosion deposited in Frumkin’s study.
“A wildfire is normally seen only as a catastrophe, but environmental disruption can also expose people to new materials and new possibilities,” said Frumkin. “Neolithic communities in the Jordan Valley may have watched fire transform the clay beneath and around their settlements and realized that this process could be reproduced deliberately. If so, one of humanity’s most important technologies may have emerged partly from people learning to imitate what they had already seen nature do.”
This earlier period can serve as a comparison for this hypothesis. Vegetation also declined, and clay deposited heavily during the last interglacial period; however, pottery did not appear after that event. Frumkin sees this as an example of a natural limitation because the required materials were available 120,000 years earlier, but there were no settled, agricultural societies to identify and replicate the process.
The comparison suggests that environmental conditions alone were not enough to produce pottery. The innovation may have emerged when these conditions intersected with a society capable of recognizing the opportunity and reproducing what it observed.
Frumkin stresses that the hypothesis is still speculative. Although the fires, the clay deposits, and the earliest pottery all come from roughly the same period, current dating techniques cannot establish the exact order of events. Further excavations might search for fire-baked clay beneath the oldest pottery layers and test whether wildfires in the Jordan Valley reached the temperatures needed to harden clay. Finding any pottery that clearly predates the major fire episode would challenge this hypothesis.
Austin Burgess is a writer and researcher with a background in sales, marketing, and data analytics. He holds an MBA, a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration, and a data analytics certification. His work focuses on breaking scientific developments, with an emphasis on emerging biology, cognitive neuroscience, and archaeological discoveries.
The ancient Austronesian maritime civilization may have carried painted art on its journeys before developing its first Neolithic pottery, according to new study findings.
The Austronesian culture traveled from Easter Island to Madagascar and Taiwan to New Zealand, demonstrating their skill as advanced seafarers of the ancient world. In a recent paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from The Australian National University (ANU) and Indonesia’s National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN) describe a 4,000-year-old artifact displaying the Austronesian Painting Tradition (APT).
The find was made on Indonesia’s Wetar Island, at the Huknaur rockshelter, a site known for its prehistoric art, including cave art that has defied conclusive dating attempts.
Roughly 4,200 years ago, the Austronesian people began their journeys across the sea, exploring large portions of their region. Technologically, they developed impressive boats with a focus on stability engineering to master harsh seas and highly efficient sails to travel great distances. Their success in venturing into these regions left them with a reputation as some of history’s greatest seafarers.
The defining feature of these peoples was the shared Austronesian language group, still spoken by some 386 million people across more than 1,200 languages today.
One of the primary methods archaeologists have used to trace how ancient Austronesian culture spread through the region is through traces of pottery. Surprisingly, a painted plaque was found on a preceramic layer, suggesting this intriguing artifact could predate the arrival of ceramic technology in the area, and potentially dates some of the earliest sea voyages to sometime between the Paleolithic and Neolithic eras.
Elements common to the APT art style include geometric designs, small human figures, and the boats for which they are best known. The latest example of this art appears on a stone plaque, covered in a common APT motif: a red concentric circle with radiating sun rays. Archaeologists have found similar pieces in the West Pacific, but this one’s mobility makes it extraordinary.
“This is the first portable example of Austronesian painted art ever found archaeologically,” said lead author Professor Sue O’Connor of ANU. “Portable symbols could travel with people and may have helped communicate shared identities, affiliations and beliefs between island communities. Similar sun-like designs were historically painted on boats and other objects, where they could function as symbols of protection and group identity.”
“This discovery shows that the characteristic sun-ray motif was already part of the APT during the earliest Austronesian expansion into southern Wallacea,” explained co-author Dr Simona Kealy, of the ANU. “These people were extraordinary seafarers, rapidly dispersing across thousands of kilometres of ocean. The Wetar plaque shows that art and shared symbolic traditions were part of this great maritime dispersal from its earliest phases.”
Typically, APT work is discovered on rock shelters and cave walls. While interesting, archaeologists are often confounded by the difficulty in properly dating cave wall art. Typically, such paintings are created with inorganic mineral pigments, which cannot be carbon-dated.
Now, with the first portable object ever discovered bearing the APT style, the researchers can date such a piece for the first time. Their precise results place the object during the Austronesian spread throughout maritime Southeast Asia, sometime between 4,090 and 4,900 years ago.
“This discovery shows that Austronesian pioneers arrived with a compelling ideology represented by the APT paintings, prior to more extended contacts bringing pottery,” said co-author Dr Ceri Shipton of ANU. “People didn’t just carry technologies and possessions when they voyaged to new islands. They carried ideas, identities, and new ways of understanding the world.”
The paper, “4000-Year-Old Painted Plaque from Southeast Indonesia Reveals Austronesian Painting Tradition Preceded Neolithic Pottery,” appeared in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on August 17, 2026.
Ryan Whalen covers science and technology for The Debrief. He holds an MA in History and a Master of Library and Information Science with a certificate in Data Science. He can be contacted at ryan@thedebrief.org.
A discovery by archaeologists at the Pre-Pottery Neolithic site of Çemka Höyük in southeastern Turkey is extending the accepted timelines on the origins of ancient ceramic technology.
The discovery, detailed in a new study that appeared in the journal Antiquity, provides some of the earliest evidence yet uncovered for intentionally fired pottery in Southwest Asia. The findings appear to show that the first experimentation with ceramic technology began thousands of years earlier than once believed.
At the heart of the findings are a collection of more than 45 low-fired clay fragments, representing at least nine separate vessels, which researchers unearthed at the site of Çemka Höyük in Mardin Province. The fragments date to approximately 9,350 BC, placing them in a period that predates the widespread adoption of pottery during the seventh millennium BC by nearly two millennia.
The discovery offers an unprecedented glimpse into the earliest stages of ceramic innovation, adding to past discoveries that include early agricultural innovations and remarkably sophisticated monumental architecture associated with famous sites in the region like Göbekli Tepe.
Rather than evidence of full-scale pottery production, the new study by researchers Ergül Kodaş, Natalia Petrova, Maria Daghmehchi, and Rana Özbal argues that a period of experimentation seems to have begun around 11,500 years ago.
The nine vessels represented by the fragments uncovered at Çemka Höyük showcase simple slab-building techniques, where plant material, and even animal dung was sometimes mixed into the source clay to help improve its performance during the firing process. Further analysis of the samples indicated that they were intentionally heated in controlled, low-heat fires that reached temperatures of roughly 600 to 700 degrees Celsius, which produced permanent ceramic transformation, rather than mere accidental burning.
Along with the pottery fragments, archaeologists also discovered an unusual variety of clay objects at Çemka Höyük: a type of clay coating that may have once covered organic objects, along with an attachment formed from the same material that seems to have been used for enlarging the capacity of a vessel made from another material, such as stone or wood.
Altogether, the diversity of the artifacts the team uncovered points to strong evidence that early Neolithic communities in the region were already experimenting with clay in a range of different ways, before the widespread adoption of ceramic technologies for pottery production.
This is significant, since the discoveries challenge existing ideas about the emergence of pottery, which suggested that it was quickly adopted as a fully developed technology.
“This new evidence points to an early implementation and demonstrates that ceramic innovation emerged before widespread production and adoption,” the team writes, “developing regionally and progressively rather than through a single invention event.”
“Our analysis of the fired clay items from Çemka shows that the inhabitants of the site experimented with pottery production by selectively using organic temper, low-temperature firing technologies, and slab-construction techniques,” they add.
The study also places Çemka Höyük within a broader network of early clay experimentation across Southwest Asia. While similar finds have been reported from sites in Türkiye, Syria, Jordan, Iran, and Israel, the Çemka discoveries are now recognized as being among some of the oldest known examples of intentionally fired ceramic technology ever identified in the region.
Even beyond the technical implications of what the team outlines, the new study offers deeper perspectives on the social aspects of such innovations in the ancient world. For instance, to become successful, technologies must offer more than just functionality by becoming ingrained in the everyday lives of a culture.
The evidence suggests that at Çemka Höyük, use of clay underwent gradual transitions from use as a construction material to a medium used for storage and food preparation. This reflects changes in the culinary practices of the era, as well as certain community activities right down to the daily routines of Çemka Höyük’s ancient residents.
Thus, the early experiments outlined in the new study helped to lay the foundation for the sophisticated pottery use and other traditions that would ultimately make their way throughout the region, revolutionizing the ancient Near East with the arrival of one of its earliest technological revolutions.
The team’s new study, “Understanding a first attempt at pottery: early fired containers at Çemka Höyük,” appeared in the journal Antiquity.
Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. A longtime reporter on science, defense, and technology with a focus on space and astronomy, he can be reached at micah@thedebrief.org. Follow him on X @MicahHanks, and at micahhanks.com.
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