A new study suggests that a period of intense fires and landscape upheaval in the ancient southern Levant may have helped create the conditions that led Neolithic communities to discover how fire could transform clay.

Thousands of years before pottery became an everyday part of human life, communities in the southern Levant were living through a period of dramatic environmental change. Hillsides burned, vegetation disappeared, soils were stripped away, and enormous quantities of clay-rich sediment washed down into valleys.

According to a new study by Prof. Amos Frumkin of the Institute of Earth Sciences at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, those destructive events may also have helped inspire one of humanity's most important technological innovations: pottery.

Published in Geomorphology, the study brings together evidence from ancient sediments, caves, charcoal deposits and archaeological sites to reconstruct how wildfires and erosion reshaped the southern Levant during two periods of major environmental instability. Prof. Frumkin proposes what he calls the "natural kiln hypothesis": Neolithic communities may have learned that clay could be permanently hardened by fire after witnessing naturally baked clay produced during intense fires.

When the Landscape Burned
The study compared two periods separated by more than 100,000 years.

The first was the last interglacial period, known as MIS 5e, roughly 129,000 to 116,000 years ago. The second was the early Holocene, between approximately 11,000 and 7,000 years ago, when farming communities were becoming increasingly established across the region.

Evidence from both periods points to episodes of extensive wildfire followed by severe erosion. Tiny charcoal particles preserved in ancient lake sediments record peaks in burning, while chemical signatures preserved in cave formations indicate substantial losses of vegetation and soil. During the early Holocene, the most intense episode appears to have occurred around 9,500-8200 years ago.

Although Neolithic and earlier people have deliberately used fire on a limited scale, Prof. Frumkin argues that the geographical extent and timing of the fires point to climatic causes for increasing use of fire.

Once vegetation disappeared, exposed soils were vulnerable to rain and runoff. Clay-rich terra rossa soil was swept from the hills and deposited in enormous quantities in depressions, such as the Jordan and Dead Sea valleys. Instead of simply destroying habitable land, however, this process created new environments where farming communities could flourish. Large Neolithic settlements increasingly clustered on these fertile redeposited soils.

Could Nature Have Demonstrated How to Make Pottery?
It is here that the study offers a new explanation for the emergence of ceramics.

Pottery appeared in the region during roughly the same broad period in which fires, erosion and clay deposition reached their peak. Prof. Frumkin proposes that people living in the valleys may have encountered patches of clay that had been exposed to intense natural fires and noticed that heat had transformed the soft material into something hard and durable.

That observation could have provided the basic idea behind intentionally firing clay.

The hypothesis is supported by earlier petrographic research showing that Yarmukian pottery from the Jordan Valley was manufactured from local redeposited terra rossa clay, the same material that would have accumulated around settlements following the erosion of nearby hills.

“A wildfire is normally seen only as a catastrophe, but environmental disruption can also expose people to new materials and new possibilities,” said Prof. Frumkin. “Neolithic communities in the Jordan Valley may have watched fire transform the clay beneath and around their settlements and realized that this process could be reproduced deliberately. If so, one of humanity’s most important technologies may have emerged partly from people learning to imitate what they had already seen nature do.”

Pottery would eventually transform daily life, making it easier to cook, store food and liquids, ferment products and support larger settled communities. Decorated vessels and figurines also became important cultural objects, suggesting that ceramics quickly acquired significance beyond their purely practical uses.

A 120,000-Year-Old Natural Experiment

One of the most intriguing pieces of the argument comes from a much earlier period.

During the last interglacial, which predated the last glacial period, the southern Levant experienced an even more extreme combination of fires, vegetation loss, erosion and clay deposition. Yet pottery did not appear.

Prof. Frumkin describes this earlier period as something of a natural control experiment. The environment produced many of the same ingredients, but the people living in the region did not have the cognitive abilities, sedentary agricultural society, technological knowledge and social conditions that later Neolithic communities possessed.

The comparison suggests that nature alone did not invent pottery. Instead, technological innovation may have emerged when environmental opportunity met a society capable of recognizing and exploiting it.

A Hypothesis Still Waiting to Be Tested
Prof. Frumkin stresses that the natural kiln hypothesis remains speculative and testable, rather than a proven account of pottery's invention. The available evidence establishes that major fires, clay deposition and the emergence of pottery occurred within the same broad period, but current dating cannot yet demonstrate the exact sequence of events.

Future archaeological excavations could search beneath the earliest pottery-bearing layers for naturally fire-baked clay. Experimental research could also test whether wildfires in the Jordan Valley could have heated clay to the roughly 500 to 700 degrees Celsius needed to begin permanently transforming it into ceramic material. Finding pottery that clearly predates the major fire episode would challenge the hypothesis.

Rather than replacing existing theories that pottery developed through gradual experimentation, social needs or contact between communities, the study proposes another possible piece of the puzzle: environmental catastrophe itself may sometimes create opportunities for innovation.

In conclusion, the fires that stripped ancient hillsides of their soils may also have reshaped where people lived, how they farmed and, potentially, how they learned to turn earth into pottery.