“HUNGRY? I HAVE SOMETHING to show you,” the white-haired man says to the young fellow hunter he is training. “Come.”
They walk into a deep cave in a cliff wall jutting out of the forest and sit on the floor.
The older man opens the leather pouch he uses as a bag and pulls out a hard, rounded object.
“Is it… stone?” the young man asks but realizes that it can’t be. The thing is a fine-walled object, hollow inside, with an opening on top.
“It is fire-hardened earth,” the white-haired man says.
He explains that he uses it to store food for hunting expeditions, and how it can be filled with fresh water from rivers and used for cooking, too.
The young man started preparing a fire.
From that small beginning by unnamed individuals, the location apparently became the world’s first kitchen, archeologists would say, 200 centuries later.
‘THE FIRST INVENTION’
You’ll have guessed by now that the item was what we now call pottery, sometimes described by modern historians as “the first invention”.
But the inventor may have applied knowledge from temple artists, who by that time already knew that clay-formed statuettes heated intensely (to 600 to 1,000 Celsius) become hard and strong.
That cave, in Jiangxi, China, would 20,000 years later be dubbed by the New York Times as “the world’s first kitchen”, as people used the earliest known earthenware for simmering the flesh of the animals they had caught, making it softer and tastier.
The users cooked a range of meats and even boiled wild rice.
The invention spread across China, then across the water to a land mass now known as Japan. The knowledge spread further, or was independently discovered by other communities, and eventually the creation of pottery for storage and cooking could be seen world-wide.
IMMORTAL INVENTION
Today, shards of pottery from that location in China have been carbon-dated to 20,000 years ago, dating to before the neolithic (late stone age) period, and the cave attracts visitors from around the world.
The individuals who used the location have also become celebrated.
It is now known as the Xiangren Cave.
“Ren” means “person”.
A “Xian” is a person with elevated powers, sometimes translated as “Immortal” or “wizard”.