The Ceramic Age in the north

I'd thought pottery was a stone thing in the Stone Age. I was unaware of clay being fired west of Jomon-era Japan until 7000 BC well into the Mesolithic, by farmers or near-enough, in Anatolia. It may be that [eastern] hunter-gatherers were potters too.

This isn't quite the W that Graham Hancock would imagine; these HGs were inland, not the mediterranean-polynesian coastal peoples he's theorised. Still. It pulls back one of the mainstays of "civilisation" further in time. h/t Saraceni who has been doing a lot of this today.

Ceramics would, in this new study, have started 20000 years ago: 18kBCish. That is... very ice-age; this would at least account for the Jomon. ('tis further parallel to transiberian arrowheads, also tagged Ainu...) Clay pots in the "Urals" are still pegged to earliest 5800s BC (perhaps: Khvalyn) ... but thence spreading to Scandinavia, not thither from the Near East. By then the Near Eastern ceramic-age had already spread from Anatolia to Jericho. So: this piece claims that Anatolian pottery had nothing to do with anything north. The Urals' potters were EHGs, taking their cue from further east; and so became the Scandinavians' potters.

This looks cultural. I still maintain the Scandinavians had been made aware of Near Eastern (Balkan!) ceramics. But if this study holds up then the Baltic chose, instead, to inquire of the steppe.

UPDATE 3:50 MST - Greater Caspian Atlantis? Cue up the new year . . .