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 Hills That Burned Twice

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.

A Natural Kiln

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.”

The 120,000-Year Comparison

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.

Equations once used to predict whether populations of rabbits would boom, stabilize, or collapse are now being applied to something potentially even more complicated: romantic relationships.

According to mathematician Laurent Pujo-Menjouet of Claude Bernard University Lyon 1, the forces that determine whether a couple survives life’s inevitable stresses can be studied much like other complex systems. Attraction can strengthen or fade, outside pressures can push a relationship away from stability, and perhaps most importantly, there may be a critical mathematical threshold beyond which recovery becomes increasingly difficult.

In his new book, Love! Valour! Equations! The Mathematics of the Couple, published by CRC Press, Pujo-Menjouet draws on mathematical ecology, psychology, literature, and even film to explore why some couples weather years of conflict, stress, children, illness, and financial hardship while others gradually drift apart.

The goal isn’t to produce an equation that predicts who will fall in love with whom. Instead, Pujo-Menjouet treats relationships as dynamical systems—systems that change over time, respond to disturbances, and can move toward either stability or decline.

“There is no mysterious enchantment or magic potion. By now, that would be known,” Pujo-Menjouet writes in the book, which draws on mathematics, psychology, literature, and film. “Is all hope lost then? Certainly not. That is precisely where everything becomes interesting.”

From Rabbits to Relationships

The mathematical models Pujo-Menjouet uses originated in ecology. His work uses Malthusian growth models and the Lotka-Volterra equations, originally developed to describe population dynamics in animals such as rabbits. He also studies the Allee effect, a phenomenon that explains how populations struggle to recover if they drop below a particular size.

Pujo-Menjouet adapts these concepts to relationships, using the idea of a critical threshold to examine when a couple may become increasingly vulnerable to separation. He also draws on the research of psychologist John Gottman, who showed that relationship behaviors can be quantified as data.

“Just as we can predict population growth or endangered species, we can model the evolution of feelings within a couple,” Pujo-Menjouet explains. “We’re not trying to predict who you’ll fall in love with, we’re trying to understand why some couples remain stable despite life’s inevitable shocks while others slowly drift apart.”

A Threshold for Falling Apart

The basic idea is simple: a relationship may have a critical threshold, or minimum level of stability needed to keep the bond intact. Pujo-Menjouet’s model considers three main forces: mutual attraction, the gradual weakening of feelings over time, and each partner’s emotional response to the other.

“If your feelings fall below this threshold and stay there, the mathematics predicts an inevitable decline toward separation,” Pujo-Menjouet says. “However, understanding this threshold gives couples a powerful tool: they can recognize danger zones and take corrective action.”

These models emphasize how couples recover from drifting apart. The key question is not whether couples experience conflict, but whether they have the resilience to restore balance afterward.

“Life will always send its wolves: stress, illness, work, children, financial difficulties,” Pujo-Menjouet says, “mathematics helps us understand how to build the brick house rather than the straw one.”

Could AI Become Love’s Early-Warning System?

Researchers such as Pujo-Menjouet are considering whether they could combine these mathematical models with artificial intelligence to create an early-warning system for relationships. Such a system could detect the signs of instability before they become apparent to the people involved.

Pujo-Menjouet compares this method to a GPS for relationships, showing where a couple currently is, where its dynamics may be heading, and the various ways they could arrive at a healthier place. Although the models don’t decide who somebody will love, they can help explain how relationships evolve and what actions might help couples maintain their connection. Early detection of problems would allow partners to make changes before reaching a stage where recovery becomes unlikely.

Why Love Resists a Formula

Pujo-Menjouet admits that present-day mathematical models have limitations. Most of these models are based on data from Western relationships. In contrast, the factors that impact whether a relationship succeeds or fails can differ from one culture, religion, or generation to another. He points out that the model must account for additional factors to be applicable everywhere.

Human behavior also introduces unpredictability that mathematical models cannot fully account for. People can change their habits, strengthen their commitment, seek therapy, or otherwise alter the dynamics of a relationship in ways the equations cannot anticipate. The equations identify tendencies rather than determine an unavoidable outcome.

“Mathematics can illuminate patterns and provide guidance,” Pujo-Menjouet says, “but ultimately, the success of a relationship depends on two people choosing, every day, to nurture their connection. The equations can show you the path, but you still have to walk it together.”

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.

For decades, the painted tombs of Tarquinia, Italy, have been viewed as artwork depicting scenes of music, feasting, processions, and the afterlife that date back to the first millennium BCE.

A recent study took a different approach to interpreting these paintings by examining how the physical characteristics of these tombs might have affected the senses of the ancient people who visited them. Archaeologists Maurizio Forte of Duke University and Jacqueline Ortoleva of the University of Oxford used AI-assisted visual analysis, 3D architectural modeling, and acoustic surveys to reconstruct the physical experience of entering two tombs over 2,400 years old.

The researchers propose that these tombs not only served as burial sites but also as spaces that could shape visitors’ sensory experiences. Their findings, published in the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, indicate that the two chambers could have produced contrasting sensory effects.

Modeling What Ancient Visitors Would Have Felt

Forte and Ortoleva prepared detailed three-dimensional models of both tombs and conducted acoustic surveys in order to gain an understanding of the sensory experience. To do this, they played recorded handclaps at different locations within each chamber and measured how the sound decayed and propagated through the space. The results indicated that low-frequency sounds under 1,000 Hz were particularly important in this environment. Forte and Ortoleva stated that people not only hear these sounds but also feel them in the body, where they can cause vibration, disorientation, and possibly alterations in cognitive state.

The team used AI models to identify features that may have attracted attention and to determine where rituals may have taken place. Lighting relied on candlelight, as torches would have produced unsafe amounts of smoke in these confined spaces.

A Calming Experience

Built between 450 and 400 BCE, the smaller Tomba del Gallo offers a striking contrast to the larger tomb. A steep stairway measuring 3.31 meters long and 2.5 meters wide descends to a burial chamber. The artists painted a banquet scene on one wall of the stairway corridor and musicians playing pipe instruments on the opposite wall.. This stairway leads directly into the main chamber.

In the main chamber, visitors naturally focus on the paintings and on points where the architecture changes. Areas of high curvature where the chamber walls meet function as visual focal points. Visitors may have used these areas for ritual offerings or performed ritual gestures there.

The acoustics in the Tomba del Gallo also suggest this function. The reverberation in the chamber is short and doesn’t allow sound to build up. Instead, it rises and moves away from the space. The researchers’ simulations link the combination of clear sightlines and short reverberation to alpha-band brain activity, often associated with relaxed alertness and focused visual attention. The researchers describe the result as a comparatively calm, focused experience that lets visitors concentrate on the paintings.

A Disorienting Descent Into the Afterlife

The second tomb, Tomba dei Demoni Azzurri, dates to the same period, between 450 and 420 BCE. The burial chamber is much larger, measuring 6.2 by 6.1 meters, almost four times as large as that of Tomba del Gallo.

One image in the tomb depicts a group of demons with a small boat carrying a woman and a smaller man. Etruscan iconography often associated demons with the afterlife.

Compared with the Tomba del Gallo, the acoustics in this chamber are considerably more intense. The reverberation is greater and lasts longer, particularly in the area near the banquet scene, and sound passes easily between the tomb and the outside area. Forte and Ortoleva state that the variety of reverberation times means both low-frequency sounds, such as drumbeats or handclaps, and high-frequency sounds such as voices would have echoed throughout the space, thus producing a far more powerful sonic environment than in the smaller tomb.

“Visual saliency analysis identifies the blue demon on the right wall as an extreme attentional attractor,” Forte and Ortoleva write. “The demon’s chromatic qualities, combined with its aggressive posture and spatial prominence in the center of the burial chamber’s right wall, produce an element of visual surprise. The visual gaze is arrested and attention seems to be forcibly captured. This is paralleled by the acoustics of the tomb.”

The combination of low-frequency vibration, loss of spatial orientation, and increasingly unintelligible speech may have left visitors feeling disembodied and disoriented. The team’s simulations link these effects to beta-band activity and transient gamma bursts, which are associated with heightened alertness and threat detection.

An Open Question

Together, the two tombs suggest that Etruscan mourners moved through carefully arranged environments of candlelight, painted figures, and resonant sound, with each tomb offering a distinct sensory experience. It remains unclear whether the tomb builders intentionally designed these effects or if they simply resulted from the available architecture and materials.

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.