jan 1, 18000 BC - 18,000 BCE - Xianrendong Cave Pottery World's Oldest Ceramic Pots Pottery appeared long before Stone Age humans took up farming and animal husbandry (known as "Immortal's Cave" in Chinese) at the foot of Xiaohe mountain, in Wannian County, in northeastern Jiangxi, in southeast China.

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Over the past 20 years, a series of exciting discoveries in the field of prehistoric art have pushed back the earliest date for the invention of pottery by more than 10,000 years. In June 2012, for instance, an article in Science magazine (June 2012), confirmed that fragments (sherds) of Chinese pottery discovered in Xianrendong Cave in China's Jiangxi Province had been radiocarbon dated to 18,000 BCE, making them the oldest ceramic art ever found. Previously the earliest art of this type had been the pottery found at Yuchanyan Cave (16,000 BCE) in China's Hunan province, the Japanese Jomon Odaiyamamoto I site (14,540 BCE), the Amur River Basin pottery (14,300 BCE) and the Vela Spila pottery (c.15,500 BCE). The team at Xianrendong included scientists from Harvard and Boston universities who also examined ceramic fragments from Yuchanyan in 2009. Pottery has been a traditional Chinese art for millennia, but the Xianrendong Cave sherds establish beyond any doubt that pottery appeared long before Stone Age humans took up farming and animal husbandry. Indeed, we know that forms of ancient pottery were made almost continuously in south China from 18,000 BCE onwards, even though the era of Neolithic art - the cultural period usually associated with the creation of domestic artifacts like pots - did not commence for another ten thousand years. Even in southern Europe, where Greek pottery didn't appear until around 7,000 BCE, humans had been making clay-fired objects for millennia - see, for example, the Venus of Dolni Vestonice (24,000 BCE) unearthed at a Gravettian settlement south of Brno, in the Czech Republic. To see how Xianrendong pottery fits into the evolution of Stone Age art as well as various forms of cave art, across the world, please see: Prehistoric Art Timeline (from 2.5 million BCE). For the history of Stone Age cultures in East Asia, see Chinese Art Timeline (18,000 BCE - now).

Prehistoric Pottery in East Asia

Almost all of the oldest pottery has been discovered in south China (notably around and to the south of the Yangzi/Yangtze River basin), although early ceramics have also been found in the Yellow River basin, and at more distant locations in East Asia, such as Japan and Russia (Amur River basin). At present there is no consensus among archeologists and anthropologists as to why pottery was invented in China, as early as 18,000 BCE, although some believe it happened because of climate. Back in 18,000 BCE, when the Last Glacial Maximum was at its height, the Earth was experiencing the coldest climatic conditions for more than a million years. Plant and animal food would not have been easy to come by, and the production of clay-fired pots as cooking devices would have allowed people to extract the maximum nutritional goodness from their food by cooking it. Cooking food is one of the best ways of boosting nutritional intake from starchy plants and meat. In any event, archeological evidence shows that news of this ancient art spread rapidly within East Asia. According to Dr Zhijun Zhao, an archaeologist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, Chinese hunter-gatherers may have established seasonal camps, specifically to make pots.

For more about Asian culture, see: Japanese Art (from 7500 BCE) and Korean Art (from 3,000 BCE). For the oldest cave painting in Asia, see: Sulawesi Cave art (Indonesia) (c.37,900 BCE).

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