The Chinese invented rice cultivation technology and obtained high-yield grains, but then the question arises, how to eat hard rice?Today's people will blurt out "cook rice with water", but more than 10,000 years ago, this was not a simple problem, because there was no "pot" that could cook rice.
In the case of wheat, there is no such problem, it can be ground into flour and baked into cakes and baked, and the difficulties encountered in early human life are far more than the lack of "pots" to cook rice, and not even the container for water and food or food storage. The importance of containers in ancient times was far greater than people today imagined.
The earliest vessel may have been a banana leaf, a scoop, a plank or shell, or even an ostrich eggshell (ancient Babylonian period). But these natural containers are neither convenient nor durable. Before the Neolithic period, humans invented pottery, and such vessels began to be widely used in the Neolithic period.
In fact, in ancient times, humans have inadvertently discovered that clay becomes hard and strong after being burned by fire. In the caves where early humans lived, traces of the use of fire were left, including clay that was burned into bricks and pottery.
According to archaeological finds, there was a gap of hundreds of thousands of years between the firing of clay into pottery and the invention of pottery. In general, the process of invention can be simply divided into two stages: the discovery of phenomena (or principles) and the use of principles to invent new methods and tools. For example, the discovery that a log can roll belongs to the stage of phenomenon discovery, while the use of wheels belongs to the stage of invention. Similarly, as we will see later, Alexander Fleming's discovery that Penicillium kills bacteria belongs to the discovery stage of the phenomenon, while Howard Flory et al.'s invention of the drug penicillin belongs to the invention stage.
Today, the time interval between these two phases is relatively short, ranging from a few years to several decades. But in ancient times, the time between the two stages would be very long, even tens of thousands of years, but there was a gap of hundreds of thousands of years from the fire clay into pottery to the widespread use of pottery, what is the strange thing about this?
First of all, it is not easy to imagine what the vessel looks like when you have never seen pottery, and the time from 0 to 1 is sometimes longer than we think.
Secondly, the appearance of pottery is actually associated with human settlement. During the Ice Age, people went to one place, pitched their tents, ate all the plants and animals they could find, and then had to migrate to another place. If you're going to be migrating every once in a while, it's obviously not a good idea to bring a pile of bulky pottery with you. Hundreds of years ago, nomadic tribes used light leather containers for water and wine rather than bulky pottery, which also shows that the emergence of pottery was related to stable dwellings. Although archaeologists have found some evidence of pottery dating back 30,000 years in the territory of today's Czech Republic, most scholars believe that the earliest pottery appeared in China and Japan 16,000 years ago, when humans had already made the transition from migration to settlement.
The third and most important condition for the emergence of pottery is that it takes a lot of wood to have enough energy to burn pottery, and it is impossible to fire pottery when the only fuel available to humans can only be used for heating at night. In addition, firing pottery requires additional labor, and it is only when humans have enough energy efficiency to have leisure time or extra labor to do it. In the 5,000 years since the end of the Ice Age, humans have only twice as much energy as they consume each day, and even with the technology to fire pottery, there is no energy to fire pottery in large quantities. Therefore, in the sites of human life of that era, there are only a few remaining pottery shards, and there is no large amount of pottery used to make containers.
The widespread use of pottery was after the Neolithic period, and the use of tools made it much more efficient for humans to obtain energy. After the beginning of the agricultural period, the total amount of energy produced by humans also increased dramatically, and there was enough energy to burn pottery. In fact, in the West, historians refer to the first phase of the Neolithic as the Neolithic before pottery, from about 12,000 years ago to 10,800 years ago, when pottery was not widely used.
It is still the Chinese living in the Pearl River valley who invented high-temperature resistant pottery. In 2001, fragments of early heat-resistant clay pots were discovered in the Guilin area, dating back 12,000 years. The earliest complete pottery found before that appeared in Japan, 10,000 years ago. The pottery made by the Chinese in the Pearl River Valley is resistant to high temperatures because of the addition of calcite to the clay. Therefore, high-temperature resistant pottery was a high-tech product at the time.
Pottery is another handicraft commonly used by humans since stone tools, ** and clothing, and its widespread use indicates that more labor can be engaged in activities other than agriculture and hunting. From a technical point of view, the difference between pottery and handmade products such as stone tools is that stone tools and other items only change the physical shape of the original material, while pottery is another product made from one raw material (clay) through a chemical reaction, so from a scientific point of view, it is of great significance.
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