Pottery is invented, thousands of years before farming
A tool of hunter-gatherers that would become the signature of settled life
Quick facts
- Oldest known pottery
- About 20,000 to 19,000 years ago
- Site
- Xianrendong Cave, Jiangxi Province, China
- Made by
- Mobile hunter-gatherers, during the last Ice Age
- Key point
- Predates farming by 10,000+ years; it was not a farmers' invention
What happened
The story that ends in cities begins with a technology that came long before any of them, and before farming itself. The oldest known pottery, from Xianrendong Cave in Jiangxi Province, China, is radiocarbon-dated to about 20,000 to 19,000 years ago, and, as the excavators state, it was produced by mobile foragers who hunted and gathered during the height of the last Ice Age, probably to cook food. The Smithsonian likewise dates the oldest East Asian pottery to roughly 18,000 years ago. This was made and used, in the researchers' own words, ten millennia or more before the emergence of agriculture.
Why it matters
Pottery is a useful corrective to a common assumption: that farming came first and everything else followed. Here the tool came first, in the hands of hunter-gatherers, and only much later became so central to settled farming villages that archaeologists split the early Neolithic into Pre-Pottery and Pottery phases. It is the opening note of this timeline precisely because it shows the transition to farming was not a single sudden invention but a long, uneven accumulation.
How we know
The 20,000-to-19,000-year date, the Xianrendong Cave location, the hunter-gatherer makers, and the explicit point that this predates agriculture by ten millennia all come from the peer-reviewed 2012 Science report on the site, accessed via PubMed. The Smithsonian's Human Origins Program independently gives the oldest East Asian pottery as about 18,000 years old.
Sources
- Smithsonian Institution. Oldest pottery (Smithsonian Human Origins Program) (2024) · Reputable sourcehumanorigins.si.edu · The domain "humanorigins.si.edu" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- Wu et al.. Early pottery at 20,000 years ago in Xianrendong Cave, China (Science, Wu et al. 2012, via PubMed) (2012) · Peer-reviewed (author-declared)pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov · Cited as a "journal" source (no stronger domain match). · Link loads, but its text didn't clearly match the event's terms
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Part of a timelineThe Neolithic Revolution10 events · How scattered bands of foragers became farmers, villagers, and finally citizens of the first cities.View all →