The history of our species is one of endless inventions, some borne out of necessity, while others transcending needs to become explorations of creative imagination.
As one of the oldest human inventions, pottery has been around long before the Neolithic period (approximately 12,000 years age) when our ancestors switched from a hunting-gathering lifestyle to a more settled one based on agriculture and animal husbandry. The earliest pottery recovered so far dates to about 20,000 years ago in China, although other cultures, too could have been making pottery as early as this.
Twenty thousand years ago was a time of extremely cold climate. The end of the ice age would not come until another 10,000 years or so. To survive the extreme cold weather, ancient people had to obtain the maximum calorific and nutritional value from their food. Pottery was the solution. By creating pots, they could cook their food and improve nutritional value from starchy plants and meat, the most common food sources for hunters and gatherers.
Xianren Cave, China
At the base of Xiaohe (“small river”) mountain in Jiangxi province in southeastern China is a karst cavity with a small entrance that leads to a long chamber. This is Xianren Cave, site of the world’s oldest known pottery. The cave was first excavated in the 1960’s. At that time, five undisturbed layers of bone and charcoal deposits were identified at the cave, spanning the transition from Upper Paleolithic to Neolithic times, between 23,000 and 6,800 BC. All layers reflected a lifestyle based primarily on fishing, hunting and gathering, with some evidence pointing to early rice cultivation in the topmost Late Neolithic layer. Over 200 pottery fragments were also found scattered in the cave, and these were initially radiocarbon-dated to about 17,000 years ago. In 2009, an international team of experts selected 45 samples of bone and charcoal, taken from layers of deposit in which the pottery fragments had been found. These samples were radiocarbon-tested in three separate laboratories in China and the US. The new tests provided conclusive evidence that the oldest pottery, previously dated to 14,700 BC – was in fact made around 18,000 BC and was therefore the earliest known pottery in history.
The fragments of pottery recovered from Xianren Cave indicated that the ancients made pots shaped from clay by adding sand, quartz and feldspar, and that the pots were used for steaming, boiling and baking food, rather than storage, given the scorch marks and soot on their outer surfaces caused by heat from fires. These 20,000-year-old pots are nearly similar to early Japanese Jomon pottery, the earliest of which dates to 15,000 years ago. These early pots were crude, poorly fired vessels of roughly 20 cm in diameter, with round bases and uneven, primitively decorated walls. The texture of the clay paste is coarse, brittle and loose, and reddish/brown in colour from firing. In some of the pots, the exterior surfaces are decorated with rope or basket-like patterns, impressed in the clay prior to firing, providing early evidence of artistic pottery. It would be another 14,000 to 16,000 years before another invention – the pottery wheel – emerged in Mesopotamia, sparking a revolution in the way ancient people could create pottery with new forms and greater artistic flair.
