Human history has been shaped by global dispersals of technologies, although understanding of what enabled these processes is limited. Here, we explore the behavioural mechanisms that led to the emergence of pottery among hunter-gatherer communities in Europe during the mid-Holocene. Through radiocarbon dating, we propose this dispersal occurred at a far faster rate than previously thought. Chemical characterization of organic residues shows that European hunter-gatherer pottery had a function structured around regional culinary practices rather than environmental factors. Analysis of the forms, decoration and technological choices suggests that knowledge of pottery spread through a process of cultural transmission. We demonstrate a correlation between the physical properties of pots and how they were used, reflecting social traditions inherited by successive generations of hunter-gatherers. Taken together the evidence supports kinship-driven, super-regional communication networks that existed long before other major innovations such as agriculture, writing, urbanism or metallurgy.
There are different ways of elaborating the cognitive scientific process. In the most ordinary way, information grows in the framework of a single stable scientific paradigm. Sometimes, new data conflict with old paradigms and a search of the way out of the epistemological impasse ultimately leads to change.It seems to us that this latter process occurred in the study of the Neolithisation process in the north-east of the Sea of Azov region. The evidence from multilayer Early Neolithic settlements such as Rakushechnyi Yar, Matveev Kurgan I and II, and Razdorskaya 2 (Fig. 1), which was published separately many times in scientific literature (Krizhevskaya 1991;Belanovskaya 1995;Wechler 2001; Tsybrij 2008; Aleksandrovsky et al. 2009) already does not correspond with many parameters with the old prevailing schema of the development of the Early-Middle Holocene cultures of the southern part of East Europe (Danilenko 1969;Belanovskaya, Telegin 1996;Kotova 2003). This had many causes.First of all, according to recent evidence (Aleksandrovsky et al. 2009.89-98; Tsybrij et al. 2013.272-
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