do you think hunter-gatherers would have made and used pots?give reason
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Yes. In some places.
Once you know how to make things out of clay and how to make them hard in a fire pit, making a pottery vessel for cooking or storage is fast and easy. If you live near clay you can make new pots whenever you need them. Making vessels to store wild grains, seeds, or nuts out of wood, stone, leather or basketry all are harder. Wood will not break but you must put stones inside not on the fire and they are hard and slow to make. The same for basketry but also rats will gnaw it. Leather bags have a similar problem, slow to make, can’t put it on the fire and animals will eat it. Stone bowls are possible but very labor intensive. So, although pottery is breakable, for a pottery it is quick and easy to make more.
The earliest pottery vessels we have found are all from hunter gatherer societies in east Asia. The earliest dates are 18,000–20,000 years ago, long before agriculture. The oldest rice cultivation is around 7,700 years ago and the oldest millet farming was 8,000 years ago. It is even possible that the ability to store wild grains, nuts and seeds, was in part the push to begin to plant them.
The idea that there were not hunter gatherers who stored food is false. The idea that all hunting and gathering people were highly mobile is false. Many such people mainly lived in one or two seasonal areas. Before agriculture there were people who settled in areas with a great deal of surplus food that needed to be stored. Food also needed to be cooked and tannins needed to be leached form nuts. In some places people were extracting fish oil as well. These sorts of practices continued in some places up into historic time as in the people of the Pacific northwest coast. Wild grass collecting and processing existed in China long before the agriculture, and even before the invention of pottery and such seeds needed to be stored. These were egalitarian of the early societies in China and Japan and the Amur River Valley, with well-developed hunting-gathering activities. The possibility of boiling raw foods for a long time was one of the main advantages compared with other types of waterproof containers made of organic materials (wood, basketry and gourds). Boiling allowed prehistoric people to extract more nutrients from meat and bones.
Once you know how to make things out of clay and how to make them hard in a fire pit, making a pottery vessel for cooking or storage is fast and easy. If you live near clay you can make new pots whenever you need them. Making vessels to store wild grains, seeds, or nuts out of wood, stone, leather or basketry all are harder. Wood will not break but you must put stones inside not on the fire and they are hard and slow to make. The same for basketry but also rats will gnaw it. Leather bags have a similar problem, slow to make, can’t put it on the fire and animals will eat it. Stone bowls are possible but very labor intensive. So, although pottery is breakable, for a pottery it is quick and easy to make more.
The earliest pottery vessels we have found are all from hunter gatherer societies in east Asia. The earliest dates are 18,000–20,000 years ago, long before agriculture. The oldest rice cultivation is around 7,700 years ago and the oldest millet farming was 8,000 years ago. It is even possible that the ability to store wild grains, nuts and seeds, was in part the push to begin to plant them.
The idea that there were not hunter gatherers who stored food is false. The idea that all hunting and gathering people were highly mobile is false. Many such people mainly lived in one or two seasonal areas. Before agriculture there were people who settled in areas with a great deal of surplus food that needed to be stored. Food also needed to be cooked and tannins needed to be leached form nuts. In some places people were extracting fish oil as well. These sorts of practices continued in some places up into historic time as in the people of the Pacific northwest coast. Wild grass collecting and processing existed in China long before the agriculture, and even before the invention of pottery and such seeds needed to be stored. These were egalitarian of the early societies in China and Japan and the Amur River Valley, with well-developed hunting-gathering activities. The possibility of boiling raw foods for a long time was one of the main advantages compared with other types of waterproof containers made of organic materials (wood, basketry and gourds). Boiling allowed prehistoric people to extract more nutrients from meat and bones.
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