• DOI:10.1126/science.1218643
• Corpus ID: 37666548

Early Pottery at 20,000 Years Ago in Xianrendong Cave, China

@article{Wu2012EarlyPA,
  title={Early Pottery at 20,000 Years Ago in Xianrendong Cave, China},
  author={Xiaohong Wu and Chi Zhang and Paul Goldberg and David J. Cohen and Yan Pan and Trina Arpin and Ofer Bar‐Yosef},
  journal={Science},
  year={2012},
  volume={336},
  pages={1696 - 1700}
}

• Xiaohong Wu, Chi Zhang, +4 authors O. Bar‐Yosef
• Published 29 June 2012
• History
• Science

Pots and Crocks The invention of pottery allowed for more secure storage of food than was provided by baskets or hide pouches, and the vessels could also be used in cooking. The earliest pottery has been thought to have appeared in China and Japan ∼18,000 years ago, several thousands of years before the advent of agriculture. Wu et al. (p. 1696); see the Perspective by Shelach) have now dated broken pieces of pottery from a cave in China, the earliest of which date to ∼20,000 years ago, the time of the Last Glacial Maximum. Scorch marks on many pieces imply that the pottery was used in cooking. Shards from a cave in China imply that humans had invented pottery and used it for cooking by about 20,000 years ago. The invention of pottery introduced fundamental shifts in human subsistence practices and sociosymbolic behaviors. Here, we describe the dating of the early pottery from Xianrendong Cave, Jiangxi Province, China, and the micromorphology of the stratigraphic contexts of the pottery sherds and radiocarbon samples. The radiocarbon ages of the archaeological contexts of the earliest sherds are 20,000 to 19,000 calendar years before the present, 2000 to 3000 years older than other pottery found in East Asia and elsewhere. The occupations in the cave demonstrate that pottery was produced by mobile foragers who hunted and gathered during the Late Glacial Maximum. These vessels may have served as cooking devices. The early date shows that pottery was first made and used 10 millennia or more before the emergence of agriculture.