TECHNOLOGY

Xianrendong: the Oldest Pottery

~20,000 years ago

Palaeolithic · Upper Palaeolithic · Last glacial · Last Glacial Maximum

At Xianrendong Cave, in southern China, hunter-gatherers were making pottery 20,000 to 19,000 years ago, at the height of the ice age, earlier than anywhere else.

Xianrendong Cave, in Jiangxi province, southern China, has yielded the oldest known pottery sherds, dated to 20,000 to 19,000 years and published in 2012. They are coarse vessels, made at the height of the last glaciation by mobile hunter-gatherers, whose culinary use is probable. Comparable ceramics appear in Japan and eastern Siberia two to three millennia later. Fired clay thus precedes agriculture by at least ten millennia.

Why it matters

The classically accepted sequence, agriculture then sedentism then ceramics, is inverted. Firing moreover constitutes the first irreversible transformation of a material: it drives off the water bound to the clay minerals and welds the grains together, so that the piece can no longer be softened by water, the distinction that separates a dried lump from a watertight vessel. Ceramics further become the principal reference material of later prehistory, their resistance to burial exceeding that of any other manufactured object.

Dating & uncertainty

Radiocarbon applied to the levels containing the oldest sherds at Xianrendong gives 20,000 to 19,000 calendar years, and the micromorphology of those layers excludes significant disturbance. The same craft appears shortly afterwards in Japan and eastern Siberia, which leads to the consideration of several independent appearances around glacial East Asia.

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