The oldest pottery
Hunter-gatherers in China make cooking pots 10,000 years before agriculture.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 1 thousand years
- Known to
- ± 1 thousand years
- Era
- Late Pleistocene, Quaternary
Fragments from Xianrendong Cave in Jiangxi, dated to about 20,000 years ago, are the oldest known pottery vessels. They were made by mobile foragers during the Last Glacial Maximum, and scorching suggests they were used for cooking — probably boiling, which extracts far more nutrition from bones, shellfish and starchy plants than roasting does. The long-assumed link between pottery and farming is simply wrong: the pot comes first, by a very wide margin.