'Oldest pottery' found in China (BBC)

Examples of pottery found in a cave at Yuchanyan in China's Hunan province may be the oldest known to science.

By determining the fraction of a type, or isotope, of carbon in bone fragments and charcoal, the specimens were found to be 17,500 to 18,300 years old.

The authors say that the ages are more precise than previous efforts because a series of more than 40 radiocarbon-dated samples support the estimate.

The work is reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The Yuchanyan cave was the site where the oldest kernels of rice were found in 2005, and it is viewed as an important link between cave-dwelling hunter-gatherer peoples and the farmers that arose later in the basin of the nearby Yangtze River.
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more: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8077168.stm

I'll have to read more about this find.

the former claimant to the world's oldest pottery.



This is from about 13,000 BC and comes from the Niigata area on the northwest coast.

Hmm, that is the part that faces the Asian mainland...

was always something of an anomaly. Even the Japanese researchers didn't believe their dates at first. It seemed like pottery just suddenly appeared in Japan thousands of years earlier than anywhere else. Maybe it's not such an anomaly after all.