Understanding how innovations appeared and dispersed in prehistory has long been a challenge for archaeologists. In recent years, enormous progress has been made in understanding the origin of domesticated animals and plants in western Eurasia and their spread via population expansion1. Far less is known about innovations among ancient hunter-gatherers. A recent study by Dolbunova and an international team of colleagues2 uses a range of techniques to shed light on how the making and use of pottery (Fig. 1) spread among Holocene hunter-gatherers west of the Urals in the sixth millennium bc.

Fig. 1: Hunter-gatherer pottery from the east Baltic region.
figure 1

Image reproduced with permission from ref. 10.

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It is worth putting this work in long-term perspective. When grand schemes of social evolution were being created by theorists such as L. H. Morgan and Sir John Lubbock in the nineteenth century, key indicators of human progress were the origin of farming and the first use of pottery vessels, which were believed to be connected to one another and to define the beginning of the Neolithic age. A tradition in the West has always emphasized the presence of farming as the key feature of the Neolithic, but in the Soviet Union Engels’s idea that pottery developed first was taken up and led to the Neolithic being defined by the appearance of pottery alone3. This has continued and has been a source of confusion ever since, because pottery did not radically change human societies and economies as agriculture did.

As studies of the first farmers in southwest Asia developed, it became apparent in the mid-twentieth century that pottery was a later innovation; a substantial ‘pre-pottery’ farming phase was recognized. Conversely, it was already clear that there were hunter-gatherer communities in Scandinavia that made and used pottery, but it was assumed — in keeping with negative perceptions of hunter-gatherers’ ability to innovate — that they must have acquired these skills from nearby farmers. Such assumptions have only been finally overturned in the twenty-first century. The increasingly widespread application of radiocarbon dating has shown that the earliest pottery in Eurasia is to be found on hunter-gatherer sites in China and Japan, dating back to perhaps 20,000 years ago — long before the first appearance of farming anywhere in the world4. Most probably pottery gradually spread west from east Asia among hunter-gatherer groups of the Eurasia steppe–forest zone, although multiple centres of innovation in this zone cannot be excluded5.

Additionally, in the past 20 years the development of methods to extract ancient organic residues from early pottery and to chemically characterize their sources in terms of whether they come from marine or freshwater resources, plants or terrestrial animal carcasses, or milk fats6 has made it possible to identify what was cooked in ancient pots. It seems that a major use was the cooking of aquatic resources, which have long been recognized as an important basis for increased sedentism in hunter-gather societies.

Dolbunova and co-authors2 use radiocarbon dating and organic residue analysis in combination with a range of other techniques to ask whether the spread of pottery west of the Urals had multiple origins, whether it was the result of a population expansion (as with the spread of farming in Europe) and what functions pottery fulfilled that would account for its uptake. To achieve this, they carried out residue analyses of pottery from 156 eastern European hunter-gatherer sites and used descriptive-attribute data on shape, size, decoration and methods of vessel construction from 1,226 pottery vessels, together with associated radiocarbon dates, to make inferences about cultural transmission processes. They found that the dates were consistent with a single origin in western Siberia or central Asia and indicate a diffusion rate for pottery of 6–10 km per year. This is extremely fast for a non-maritime expansion, comparable with the 7.5–10.6 km per year that has recently been estimated for the demic expansion of farmers along the north coast of the Mediterranean, which modelling suggests involved coastal jumps by boat of 240–427 km at a time7. In the present case, the authors argue that the spread of pottery is too fast to have taken place through demic expansion, although this remains to be confirmed by ancient DNA analyses.

The ceramic residue analyses indicate that the pottery was mainly used for cooking. However, in contrast to the areas in east Asia where pottery first appeared and was used for cooking freshwater and marine organisms, among European hunter-gatherers it was used to cook plants and terrestrial animals as well as aquatic resources, as in western Siberia8.

Of particular interest in Dolbunova et al.’s study2 is the attempt to address the processes of cultural transmission of pottery making and use, given that demic expansion is unlikely to account for it in this case. Quantitative analyses of the similarities between pottery assemblages at different sites (in terms of their decoration, shape and technology) and the sites’ geographical locations showed that similarity in all these features was strongly affected by the sites’ distance from one another and their riverine connections, indicating that these attributes were transmitted together as a package. This pattern was not nearly so marked in terms of variation in vessel use, owing to the ecological homogeneity of the region. Similarity between sites in terms of pottery morphology was correlated with between-site distances up to 500 km, suggesting that this might correspond to the range of hunter-gatherer contact networks. The advantage that pottery offered over cooking in organic containers remains unclear, but elsewhere it has been noted that pottery vessels are labour-saving compared with heating up water in baskets by adding hot stones and removing them as they cool down9; in the case considered here, reduced mobility leading to less breakage of fragile and heavy pots might have tipped the balance.

There is much more work to be done along the lines of Dolbunova et al.’s study to understand the spread of pottery and other aspects of the prehistoric societies and economies of the northern half of Eurasia, which until recently have seen little modern scientific archaeological work. The article under discussion is representative of a recent major expansion of international collaboration with regional scholars that has been transforming our knowledge of these societies. Sadly, it seems likely that in the immediate future such research will grind to a halt as one more example of the collateral damage associated with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.