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World’s oldest pottery found in China

According to a report, the shards of pottery, dating back 18,000 years, have been unearthed in a cave in Hunan province, southern China.

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London: Archaeologists have found the earliest evidence for pottery making, in the form of fragments from a Chinese cave, which push back the dawn of the craft by more than 1,000 years.

According to a report in Nature News, the shards of pottery, dating back 18,000 years, have been unearthed in a cave in Hunan province, southern China.

The manufacture of ceramic pots and other items is generally associated with the change from Paleolithic hunter-gatherer societies into sedentary Neolithic communities, which began about 10,000 years ago in the eastern Mediterranean. But, pottery manufacture began considerably earlier in East Asia, during the late Paleolithic. Until now, the earliest previous finds in East Asia were dated to 15,000-16,000 years ago.

In a new study, archaeologists Elisabetta Boaretto of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, and Xiaohong Wu of Peking University in Beijing and their colleagues show that humans were making containers out of fired clay even earlier than was previously thought.

Other excavations in the area around Yuchanyan Cave have unearthed early human settlements from the Late Pleistocene period. Normally, an excavation project would seek to date as many carbon samples as possible, explained Boaretto.

But in this case, the team conducted pre-screening in the field and then did a preliminary analysis of 150 samples using infrared and Raman spectroscopy. Only the 30 samples that these tests showed to be clean and well preserved then underwent carbon-dating analysis.  
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