2012/06/28 by Xiaohong Wu, Chi Zhang, Paul Goldberg +4 · 6 citations
Social Sciences · Earth and Planetary Sciences · #Pleistocene-Era Hominins and Archaeology #Archaeology and ancient environmental studies #Pacific and Southeast Asian Studies
paper · doi:10.1126/science.1218643
openalex publication_date 2012/06/28 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
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.