The Guadalajara Reporter

How the bowl shaped the world

The bowl hasn’t changed much since the Neolithic era, 4,000-10,000 years ago, said Julie Lasky, the deputy editor of the New York Times’ House & Garden section March 27.  She was reporting that a small white ceramic bowl carved with the lotus blossoms had just fetched more than 2.2 million dollars at auction at Sotheby’s in New York. That was ten times more than the famed auction house expected. (But present day peoples have a habit of devaluing bowls generally, no matter how useful and striking they are.)

Lasky’s remark that bowls haven’t changed much for 10,000 years prompted others to say that bowls hadn’t really changed much for 200,000 years, when our nearest pre-historical relatives, Neanderthals, dominated Eurasia, and such utensils began to appear. These relatives of ours — about whom we are swiftly learning more (they were not ape-like monsters) – had the ingenious idea of creating “receptacles,” first by using the stomach and bladders of animals killed by hunters. Heated stones were placed inside. Neanderthals were versatile in making tools from flint, which lead to hollowing out stone to produce bowls.  Also used were plate- and bowl-like bones of animals. Then came bowls made by hollowing out hard wood that caught fire slowly. This was followed by rough-molding and baking clay. This tends to make some paleoanthropologists see Lasky and other bowl aficionados as a bit too quickly dismissive. For those stocky, bulkily muscled relatives of ours soon began perfecting both a versatility and a subtle handsomeness in their receptacles — using sand to produce a variety of contrasting outer surfaces. A bowl became a tankard, a pail, a moveable vat, an indoor basin, a bathtub.

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