17,500 year old pottery found in Croatia
What tends to happen in the world of
archaeology is something called 'smoothing'. Smoothing requires the ironing out
or ignoring of anachronistic evidence, known as 'anomalies', that crop up. This
can lead to circular thinking, and it also discourages other archaeologists
from reporting such 'anomalies'. So they always remain unexplained 'anomalies'
until more are found, and when this happens, the whole story changes, in other
words, the paradigm about what we believe about our ancestors is shattered. The paradigm about when our ancestors were
clever enough to make ceramics or pottery is about to shatter.
This newly
discovered Croatian pottery isn't quite as old as the 20,000 year old pottery
found in China recently, but its date of 17,500 years ago makes the Chinese
pottery not such a rare 'anomaly'. It's also an indicator that such a pre-Ice
Age civilisation flourished in the Balkans ~ which is not a million miles from
the Bosnian pyramids where ceramics have also been found and where the only
explanation of a culture being there would be that it was before the last Ice
Age.
Evidence of a community of prehistoric artists and craftspeople who “invented” ceramics during the last Ice Age – thousands of years before pottery became commonplace – has been found in modern-day Croatia. The finds consist of 36 fragments, most of them apparently the broken-off remnants of modelled animals, and come from a site called Vela Spila on the Adriatic coast. Archaeologists believe that they were the products of an artistic culture which sprang up in the region about 17,500 years ago. Their ceramic art flourished for about 2,500 years, but then disappeared.
