The Venus figurine you linked to is interesting. I knew there were carved figurines that old but not fired ceramic. Maybe Courland is wrong, or maybe he’s just talking about kilning (presumably this figurine, dating from over 27 kya, would have been fired on a campfire, not in kiln).
In any case, I wouldn’t call the figurine pottery, so maybe what I wrote is still technically correct?
Courland (and the many others who say the same thing) probably means that there weren’t ceramics in the mideast before lime. But there were ceramics elsewhere.
What is your technical criterion? That it isn’t a pot? Maybe that is what people mean by “Pottery Neolithic,” but this seems to me a stupid criterion. Anyhow, there were ceramic pots in many places in East Asia before this. The general world-wide trend is that ceramic pots predate local agriculture, with the odd exception of the mideast. Here is pot from China, dated there 20-10kya, together with a fragment said to have a more precise dating of 20kya. Here is a Japanese pot. Here is a Siberian potsherd. I think South American pottery was pots, but I’m not sure. It’s pretty recent, but I think it predated Andean agriculture, although not Mexican. African bowls predate agriculture and seem contemporaneous with Çatalhöyük, perhaps Göbekli Tepe. [This is list is simply the second paragraph of wikipedia on pottery, which was the basis for my previous claim about “all around the world,” but now I’ve tracked down the individual examples.]
The Venus figurine might be uniquely old, but Croatia had a bunch of paleolithic ceramic figurines.
The Venus figurine you linked to is interesting. I knew there were carved figurines that old but not fired ceramic. Maybe Courland is wrong, or maybe he’s just talking about kilning (presumably this figurine, dating from over 27 kya, would have been fired on a campfire, not in kiln).
In any case, I wouldn’t call the figurine pottery, so maybe what I wrote is still technically correct?
Courland (and the many others who say the same thing) probably means that there weren’t ceramics in the mideast before lime. But there were ceramics elsewhere.
What is your technical criterion? That it isn’t a pot? Maybe that is what people mean by “Pottery Neolithic,” but this seems to me a stupid criterion. Anyhow, there were ceramic pots in many places in East Asia before this. The general world-wide trend is that ceramic pots predate local agriculture, with the odd exception of the mideast. Here is pot from China, dated there 20-10kya, together with a fragment said to have a more precise dating of 20kya. Here is a Japanese pot. Here is a Siberian potsherd. I think South American pottery was pots, but I’m not sure. It’s pretty recent, but I think it predated Andean agriculture, although not Mexican. African bowls predate agriculture and seem contemporaneous with Çatalhöyük, perhaps Göbekli Tepe. [This is list is simply the second paragraph of wikipedia on pottery, which was the basis for my previous claim about “all around the world,” but now I’ve tracked down the individual examples.]
The Venus figurine might be uniquely old, but Croatia had a bunch of paleolithic ceramic figurines.