18,000 to 9500 BCE · Africanspan
Pottery was invented twice in East Asia before it appeared elsewhere
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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.
A code like HT-WIB-000044 is a bates number. It marks one page of our stamped scan of the book, so the same page can be found again by anyone working from the same copy. Open one to see every entry drawn from that page.