TECHNOLOGY

Clay Learns to Hold Fire

~20,000 years ago

Palaeolithic · Upper Palaeolithic · Last glacial · Last Glacial Maximum

The world's oldest known pottery comes from Xianrendong Cave, in southern China: coarse cooking vessels made 20,000 to 19,000 years ago, at the coldest depth of the ice age, by mobile hunter-gatherers. Similar early ceramics appear in Japan and Siberia soon after. Fired clay predates farming by fully ten thousand years.

Why it matters

The textbook order once ran: farming, villages, then pottery. China's caves reversed it: foragers under glacial stress invented the transforming pot first, perhaps to render bones, shellfish and starches into food that stretched further. Ceramics is also the first synthetic material, earth turned by fire into a new substance, and it became prehistory's great archive: nothing survives burial like a broken pot.

Dating & uncertainty

Radiocarbon on the archaeological contexts of the earliest sherds at Xianrendong gives 20,000 to 19,000 calendar years, with micromorphology confirming the layers were intact. Comparable early pottery follows in Japan and eastern Siberia; the craft has several independent-looking beginnings around glacial East Asia.

Sources

1. Wu et al. (2012), Science · Early pottery at 20,000 years ago in Xianrendong Cave, Chinadoi:10.1126/science.1218643
2. Cohen et al. (2017), Quaternary International · The emergence of pottery in China: recent dating of two early pottery cave sites in South Chinadoi:10.1016/j.quaint.2016.08.024
3. Patania et al. (2019), Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences · Micromorphological analysis of the deposits at the early pottery Xianrendong cave site, Chinadoi:10.1007/s12520-019-00788-6

Our species’ history as one day

22:30:511 h 29 min before midnight

if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day