World’s Oldest Pots: 20,000-Year-Old Vessels May Have Been Used For Cooking Clams Or Brewing Beer

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 2012 paper. 

“The occupations in the cave demonstrate that pottery was produced by mobile foragers who hunted and gathered during the Late Glacial Maximum. These vessels may have served as cooking devices. The early date shows that pottery was first made and used 10 millennia or more before the emergence of agriculture.”

Other archaeological evidence has revealed just how resourceful early hunter-gatherers could be. Going back way further into our past, around 1.8 million years ago, there’s reason to believe early hominids in the Olduvai Gorge used hydrothermal springs to cook food before they discovered fire. A recent study made the case for possible early metalworking by Neolithic humans in Türkiye, some 3,000 years earlier than previously thought. In some regions, they even left visual guidebooks in the form of rock art to help their descendants survive in some of the harshest places on the planet. 

Still, the revelation that pottery was being produced up to 20,000 years ago came as a surprise. It had previously been accepted that the development of farming and the creation of cooking vessels came hand in hand – once you’ve learned how to grow rice, for instance, you’ll pretty soon have to figure out a way to make it edible.

So, what were our Ice Age ancestors cooking? A study in 2013 looked into this – something that the authors say has been “largely ignored or considered only for late forager groups” – by examining tiny amounts of charred residue remaining on fragments of Japanese Jōmon pottery dating back around 11,800 to 15,000 years.

Of the 101 deposits analyzed, most were found to derive from “high-trophic-level aquatic food” – in other words, fish. While evidence of cooking residue was not available for the oldest pottery, archaeologist Zhijun Zhao, who was not on the study team, told Science News at the time that it was probable they were used to prepare clams and snails, shells of which were also found in the same cave. 

“One of the most important phenomena”

“The emergence of pottery is one of the most important phenomena in prehistory,” wrote geoarchaeologist Yaroslav V. Kuzmin in a 2015 paper. According to the discoverers of the Chinese pot fragments, it could have been a pivotal moment in allowing those early East Asians to adapt to the significant climate change that was just around the corner.

As well as being used to cook foraged seafood, authors suggest that the ancient potters could have come up with other ingenious uses for their creations. For example, they may have been used to boil animal bones to extract the fat, or even to brew alcohol, playing “a vital social role in feasting” – cheers to that!