Long before anyone deliberately shaped a bowl, a stretch of ancient wildfires may have quietly handed early farmers the idea that changed everything: clay, once burned, doesn’t go back to being soft.

A new study argues that these wildfires, and the landslides of soil that followed them, could be where the whole idea of pottery actually started.

The research was conducted by Amos Frumkin from the Institute of Earth Sciences at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Thousands of years before the first clay pot, life in the southern Levant was rough in a specific way. Hillsides caught fire and whatever plants had been holding the soil together simply disappeared. And once that happened, the rains carried the soil away, dumping huge quantities of clay-rich sediment down into the valleys below.

Frumkin pieced this story together from ancient lake sediments, cave deposits, layers of charcoal, and archaeological digs, stretching across two very different periods of the region’s past.  What emerged is an idea he’s calling the “natural kiln hypothesis,” which suggests that people may not have invented pottery from scratch. They may have copied it.

The study lines up two episodes. One is the last interglacial period, roughly 129,000 to 116,000 years ago. The other is the early Holocene, about 11,000 to 7,000 years ago, right when farming communities were starting to settle down for good. Both periods carry the same fingerprint: heavy burning followed by serious erosion. Tiny flecks of charcoal buried in old lake mud mark spikes in fire activity, and chemical traces left in cave formations show just how much vegetation and soil vanished during these stretches.

The worst of the early Holocene burning seems to have hit somewhere between 9,500 and 8,200 years ago. People back then used fire on purpose, just not at this scale. Frumkin thinks the sheer size and timing of these burns point to climate, not campfires, as the real cause. Strip a hillside of its plants and the next heavy rain has nowhere to be stopped.

Clay-rich terra rossa soil poured down from the hills and piled up in low ground in places like the Jordan Valley and around the Dead Sea. That’s not just a story of loss, though. The redeposited soil turned into some of the best farmland around, and Neolithic settlements started clustering right on top of it.