Pottery was invented twice in East Asia before it appeared elsewhere

The first pots in the world were made around 18,000 BCE near the Yangtze in China. A second tradition appears between roughly 14,500 and 12,000 BCE more than fifteen hundred kilometres to the north, at sites along the Amur River, and spreads from there into Japan. Geography then mattered in a way modern maps hide. Sea levels were low enough that Sakhalin and the Japanese islands formed a peninsula hanging south from the lower Amur country, at times joined to the mainland through Korea as well. There was no Yellow Sea. Dry land ran from what is now Korea into northern China and far beyond. Nothing stood in the way of people or techniques crossing that zone, and the decoration on the northern pots, which copies the patterns of basketry, points to one shared origin across it. Between the Yangtze and the Amur, though, the oldest known pottery is later than at either end. The northern invention therefore stands on its own, second in the world.

Around the middle of the fourteenth millennium BCE the Mushabian culture became established in Sinai and the Negev, carrying tools and toolmaking techniques characteristic of the late Afian of Egypt and the cultures that followed it there. The archaeologist Ofer Bar-Yosef argued that the Mushabian merged with the Geometric Kebaran, a local Levantine tradition, and that the merger produced the Natufian around 13,000 BCE. The Natufian lasted until the middle of the tenth millennium BCE, when farming began in the Middle East, and its makers are generally taken to be the cultural forebears of the early Semitic speakers. Follow that chain backwards. Grain harvesting in the Ethiopian highlands before 16,000 BCE, the Afian in Egypt by 15,000 BCE, the Mushabian in Sinai, the Natufian in the Levant, then the first farming villages of the Middle East. Every step runs south to north. The culture textbooks treat as the source of the Neolithic has an African grandparent.

The third independent invention of ceramics in the world belongs to Africa. By eleven and a half thousand years ago, around 9500 BCE, people in what is now Mali were making pots. The country in question lies south of the great bend of the Niger, and it falls inside the region where the ancestral form of Niger-Congo would have been spoken, the homeland of the largest language family on the continent today. Twelve thousand kilometres separate it from the Yangtze, which rules out anyone carrying the idea across. This is a dated, located archaeological finding and it has been available for years. Potters in western Africa were firing clay thousands of years before anyone in the Near East or in Europe did. The interesting question is no longer whether it happened. It is why a world history syllabus that has had this information for a generation still opens the story of ceramics in Mesopotamia and never gets to Mali at all.