Bits of the oldest known pottery, some 2,000 years older than previously found pieces, have been uncovered in China.
The pieces are older than other similar finds in hunter-gatherer contexts in China, Japan, and the Russian Far East
The fragments were believed to belong to a community of roving hunter-gatherers some 20,000 years ago and scorch marks indicate they may have been used in cooking.
However, their early dating, determined by a recent radiocarbon analysis of the nearby sediment, indicates that the pottery came long before the advent of agriculture, perhaps by as much as 10,000 years.
And the pieces are older than other similar finds in hunter-gatherer contexts in China, Japan, and the Russian Far East, said a study.
The pottery was found in the Xianrendong Cave in northern Jiangxi Province, China, some 100 kilometres south of the Yangtze River.
Radiocarbon dating shows that the cave was probably used by people from about 29,000 years ago, until 17,500 years ago.
It was then abandoned and reoccupied from about 14,500 years ago, until 12,000 years ago.
The earliest pottery found there is believed to date back about 20,000 years ago, said the study by researchers at Peking University in China, Boston University and Harvard University in the United States, and Eberhard Karls University in Germany.
That period was known as the Last Glacial Maximum, about 25,000 to 19,000 years ago.
Wu Xiaohong, professor of archaeology and museology at Peking University and the lead author of the Science article that details the radiocarbon dating efforts, said her team was eager to build on the research.
“We are very excited about the findings,” she said.
“The paper is the result of efforts done by generations of scholars.
“Now we can explore why there was pottery in that particular time, what were the uses of the vessels, and what role they played in the survival of human beings.”
The ancient fragments were discovered in the Xianrendong cave in south China’s Jiangxi province, which was excavated in the 1960s and again in the 1990s, according to the journal article.
Prof. Wu added that some researchers had estimated the pieces could be 20,000 years old, but that there were doubts.
“We thought it would be impossible because the conventional theory was that pottery was invented after the transition to agriculture that allowed for human settlement,” she said.
But by 2009, the team – which includes experts from Harvard and Boston universities – was able to calculate the age of the pottery fragments with such precision that the scientists were comfortable with their findings.
An accompanying commentary by Gideon Shelach, professor of East Asian Studies at Hebrew University suggested that even though the pottery may predate farming, “scarcity of resources during the LGM forced people to develop better ways of collecting and processing food.”
The research also pushes the emergence of pottery back to the last Ice Age, which might provide new explanations for the creation of pieces, Prof. Shelach said.