Graham Taylor

So the Pope ended up with some of our pottery, Deng Xiaoping, who was then the leader of China, and I think Fidel Castro actually ended up with a piece as well.

So

These are our claims to fame.

Well, it was.

There were interesting bits and bits that were maybe more interesting than we would have liked at times.

So I just put it here because I knew that would come up at some stage.

28,000 years ago.

28,000 years ago.

That's a long time, but it's very late in human development.

It's really late in human development.

This is the first time we know of that anybody has taken a piece of clay and

deliberately formed it and then fired it.

There are bits of clay in caves that may be earlier, but they've not been fired.

And that was the key.

And a lot of the ones in the fire were broken, exploded in the fire.

And the debate was whether they were being made as some sort of sacrifice to the fire or whether they were being made to distribute.

Well, there are huge gaps is the problem.

Basically, we see these figurines and odd ones being produced around Europe.

The next real leap forward is in China and Japan.

And it's around about 19,000 years ago, you start to see the first pots that we know of.