Bit by
bit the invention grew, like all great inventions, without any inventor.
Thus the question of the date of the first potter practically resolves
itself into the simpler question of the date of the earliest known
pottery.
Did palaeolithic man, that antique naked crouching savage who hunted the
mammoth, the reindeer, and the cave-bear among the frozen fields of
interglacial Gaul and Britain--did palaeolithic man himself, in his rude
rock-shelters, possess a knowledge of the art of pottery? That is a
question which has been much debated amongst archaeologists, and which
cannot even now be considered as finally settled before the tribunal of
science. He must have drunk out of something or other, but whether he
drank out of earthenware cups is still uncertain. It is pretty clear
that the earliest drinking vessels used in Europe were neither bowls of
earthenware nor shells of fruits, for the cold climate of interglacial
times did not permit the growth in northern latitudes of such large
natural vessels as gourds, calabashes, bamboos, or coco-nuts. In all
probability the horns of the aurochs and the wild cattle, and the
capacious skull of the fellow-man whose bones he had just picked at his
ease for his cannibal supper, formed the aboriginal goblets and basins
of the old black European savage. A curious verbal relic of the use of
horns as drinking-cups survives indeed down to almost modern times in
the Greek word _keramic_, still commonly applied to the art of pottery,
and derived, of course, from _keras_, a horn; while as to skulls, not
only were they frequently used as drinking-cups by our Scandinavian
ancestors, but there still exists a very singular intermediate American
vessel in which the clay has actually been moulded on a human skull as
model, just as other vessels have been moulded on calabashes or other
suitable vegetable shapes.
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