The Oldest Pottery Ever Found Is These 20,000-Year-Old Fragments From A Chinese Cave

You might be surprised to learn that the art of creating clay pots predates the development of agriculture. That’s right: our ancestors figured out pottery way back during the Last Glacial Maximum, when huge ice sheets shrouded the land and the first farmers were still millennia in the future. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.

The oldest examples of clay pot fragments that have so far been found were unearthed in a Chinese cave and estimated to be between 19,000 and 20,000 years old.

“The radiocarbon ages of the archaeological contexts of the earliest sherds are 20,000 to 19,000 calendar years before the present, 2000 to 3000 years older than other pottery found in East Asia and elsewhere,” wrote the discoverers in their