Hunter-gatherers had a taste for fish
20 May 2013 by Evoluted New Media
The first study to directly address the often posed question, “why did humans make pots?” reveals that the earliest use of ceramic vessels was for cooking fish.
Researchers carried out the first chemical analysis of food residues in pottery up to 15, 000 years old from the late glacial period. Through chemical analysis of organic compounds extracted from charred surface deposits, the team was able to determine the use of hunter-gatherer “J?mon” ceramic vessels found in Japan.
“Foragers first used pottery as a revolutionary new strategy in the processing of marine and freshwater fish, but perhaps most interesting is that this fundamental adaptation emerged over a period of severe climate change,” said Dr Oliver Craig from the Department of Archaeology and Director of the BioArch research centre at York.
The authors of the paper published in Nature suggest that this initial phase of ceramic production may paved the way for further intensification of pottery use by hunter-gatherers in the early Holocene era.
The researchers recovered diagnostic lipids from the pottery which were analysed for their carbon isotope composition using the isotope facility at University of Liverpool. The results revealed that that the lipids in most of the charred deposits were from high tropic level aquatic foods.
“The carbon isotopes provided us with information on the biological and chemical origin of these fatty acids and we were able to confirm that the principle fats sorbed in the pottery were of aquatic rather than land origin,” explained Dr Anu Thompson, from the School of Environmental Sciences at Liverpool.
Ceramic container technologies were previously associated with the arrival of farming but it is now known they were adapted by hunter-gatherers much earlier, but the reasons for their emergence and subsequent widespread uptake have until now been poorly understood.
“This study demonstrates that is possible to analyse organic residues from some of the world’s earliest ceramic vessels. It opens the way for further study of hunter-gatherer pottery from later periods to clarify the development of what was a revolutionary technology,” said Craig.
