Wildfires Inspired Pottery

The "natural kiln hypothesis" proposes that prehistoric people saw wildfires harden clay in the landscape and deliberately reproduced that process to invent pottery. Amos Frumkin’s study links peaks of wildfire- and landslide-driven clay deposition in the Jordan Rift Valley to the first local appearance of ceramic fragments, and he frames the earlier fire episode as a natural control lacking the social conditions for adoption. — If true, the idea reframes technological origins as instances where environmental processes provide affordances that only become innovations when social and demographic conditions permit imitation and refinement.