DOI: 10.1126/science.1218643
, 1696 (2012);336 Science
et al.Xiaohong Wu
Early Pottery at 20,000 Years Ago in Xianrendong Cave, China
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is considerably less complex, even in comparison
with later Ediacaran burrows from northwest
Canada (21) and Australia (22). Conspicuously
absent are parallel meanders and three-dimensional
avoidance that appeared later in the Ediacaran
(21). Nevertheless, sinusoidal grazing probably
marks the advent of more sophisticated grazing
behaviors and is in itself evidence of early bur-
rowing adaptation.
These findings extend the fossil record of
bilaterian eumetazoans at least 30 million years
backward to the early Ediacaran, a time con-
sistent with the youngest ages for the appearance
of bilaterians predicted bymolecular clock analy-
ses (2, 3). The molecular clock dates for the
Eumetazoa-sponge divergence have also been cor-
roborated by the recently reported body fossil
evidence of sponges from the Trezona Formation
(Australia), immediately below theMarinoan-aged
Elatina Formation (635.2 Ma), and lipid bio-
markers suggestive of Demosponges in strata
below the Hadash Formation (Marinoan) cap car-
bonate in Oman (23, 24). Therefore, it appears as
though a maximum interval of 50 My exists be-
tween the earliest definitive evidence of sponges
and the bilaterians found in the Tacuarí Forma-
tion, which implies that early animal evolution
took place on a geologically rapid time scale once
environmental conditions proved favorable for
higher forms of life to colonize the ocean realm.
Presently, the occurrence of deep-sea bilaterian
burrows at ~550 Ma (25) and the occurrence of
deep-waterVendian fauna have led some research-
ers to suggest that bilaterians have a deep-sea
origin (26–29). Based on the Tacuarí trace fossils,
the possibility is reopened that bilaterians evolved
in shallow-water settings (30), perhaps reflecting
greater food availability in this environment and
because their mobility and burrowing habit re-
quired higher oxygen levels than those of the
sessile Ediacarans.
Finally, these early Ediacaran burrows dem-
onstrate very early grazing activity by eumeta-
zoans. The grazing behavior is facilitated by a
low-amplitude sinusoidal search pattern and the
ability to leave one sedimentary lamination for
another. Evidence of active backfilling of the
burrow is important, as well as the ability to pass
sediment around or through the body and com-
pact it in the animal’s wake, which was a crucial
advancement for infaunal life-styles. These be-
havioral characteristics, though primitive, are clear-
ly derived from earlier animal ancestors.
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Acknowledgments: This work was supported by Natural
Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of
Canada Discovery Grants to K.O.K., M.K.G., and L.M.H.;
by a Comisión Sectorial de Investigación Científica–UdelaR
Grant (“El Ediacarano en Uruguay y su importancia en el
contexto del origen de la vida animal”) to K.O.K., G.V.,
M.K.G., E.P., and N.R.A.; and by an Agouron Institute
Fellowship Program grant to E. Pecoits. Partial support
for the U-Pb analyses was provided by an NSERC Major
Resource Support Grant to L.M.H. Laboratory support for
the thermal ionization mass spectrometry, LA-MC-ICPMS,
and SHRIMP U-Pb analyses was provided by B. Herchuk,
J. Schultz, G. Hatchard, A. DuFrane, and A. Simonetti.
C. Magee and staff at Geoscience Australia facilitated SHRIMP
analysis. We also thank G. Narbonne for many valuable
insights. The data presented in this paper are available in
the supplementary materials. The trace fossil collection
can be found at the Department of Earth and Atmospheric
Sciences, with accession nos. TF3 to TF16.
Supplementary Materials
www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/336/6089/1693/DC1
Materials and Methods
Supplementary Text
Figs. S1 to S13
Tables S1 to S4
References (31–46)
7 November 2011; accepted 1 May 2012
10.1126/science.1216295
Early Pottery at 20,000 Years Ago
in Xianrendong Cave, China
Xiaohong Wu,1 Chi Zhang,1 Paul Goldberg,2,3 David Cohen,2 Yan Pan,1
Trina Arpin,2 Ofer Bar-Yosef4*
The invention of pottery introduced fundamental shifts in human subsistence practices and
sociosymbolic behaviors. Here, we describe the dating of the early pottery from Xianrendong Cave,
Jiangxi Province, China, and the micromorphology of the stratigraphic contexts of the pottery
sherds and radiocarbon samples. 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. 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.
Pottery making—the manufacture of fired,ceramic container forms—differs consid-erably from the baked clay figurines or small objects known from the Upper Paleolithicperiod (1) in its technological demands and inits significance both in subsistence activities, in-
cluding food storage, processing, and cooking,
and in social interactions (2). Pottery was until
recently thought to have been developed dur-
ing the so-called “Neolithic Revolution” and
first made by settled, farming populations with
domesticated plants and animals and ground
stone tools, but recent discoveries have found
earlier examples, from Late Pleistocene mobile
or semimobile hunter-gatherer contexts in China,
Japan, and the Russian Far East (2). One notable
find, dating to ~18 to 17 thousand calendar years
before the present (cal ky B.P.), is at Yuchanyan
1School of Archaeology and Museology, Peking University,
Beijing 100871, China. 2Department of Archaeology, Boston
University, Boston, MA 02215, USA. 3Eberhard Karls Univer-
sity Tübingen, The Role of Culture in Early Expansions of
Humans, Rümelinstraße 23, D-72070 Tübingen, Germany.
4Department of Anthropology, Harvard University, Cambridge,
MA 02318, USA.
*To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail:
obaryos@fas.harvard.edu
29 JUNE 2012 VOL 336 SCIENCE www.sciencemag.org1696
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Cave (Hunan, China) (3–5). Here, we describe
and date earlier pottery from Xianrendong Cave
(Jiangxi, China).
Xianrendong Cave (28°44'10.05″N;
117°10'23.15″E) is located in Wannian County,
northern Jiangxi Province, China, some 100 km
south of the Yangtze River. The cave consists of
a large, inner hall with a small entrance, ~2.5 m
wide and 2 m high (Fig. 1). Xianrendong was
excavated in 1961 and 1964 by Li (6, 7), by Sino-
American joint expeditions in 1993 and 1995
(8, 9), and by Peking University and Jiangxi
Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Ar-
chaeology in 1999 and 2000 (10). The excavations
uncovered a long Late (or Upper) Paleolithic
sequence, with a rich assemblage of stone, bone,
and shell tools; animal bones; phytoliths; and
pieces of locally made pottery vessels [(6–11) figs.
S1 to S9].
The prehistoric deposits at Xianrendong are
located in front of the cave hall entrance. For
this study, in 2009 we reopened two trenches
from the earlier excavations, here labeled as the
“east” and “west” sections from their positions
on either side of a modern path leading into the
cave entrance (Fig. 1). The numbering of the
layers here follows the original labeling: from
top to bottom, layers 1 to 4B in the west section
(Fig. 2 and fig. S10) and layers 1 to 6B in the
east section (Fig. 3). There is no stratigraphic cor-
relation between layers with the same number-
ing across the two trenches. Pottery sherds were
found in previous excavations in layers 1A to
3C1B in the west and in layers 1A to 2B in the
east, as well as in what the original excavators
labeled as archaeological “features” but which
actually include layers and lenses, and so pro-
files were redrawn in the field in 2009 (Figs. 2
and 3 and fig. S12).
Although Xianrendong pottery was known
to be Late Pleistocene in age, with only a lim-
ited number of radiocarbon determinations from
the original excavations and no study of the com-
plex formation processes of the cave’s deposits,
uncertainty persisted over the age of the earliest
ceramics. We thus gathered systematically a new
series of samples for radiocarbon determinations
from the reopened and cleaned sections. We re-
moved blocks of sediments for micromorpholog-
ical analysis from the exposed sections concomitant
with the collection of radiocarbon samples in or-
der to establish the contextual integrity of both
the pottery and the samples collected for dating
(figs. S1 to S9) and to verify the integrity of the
pottery-containing levels as recorded in earlier
field observations (12–14).
Some 282 pottery sherds were retrieved dur-
ing the 1993 excavations at Xianrendong, from
contexts below the mixed layer 1A (figs. S1 to
S8). We did not recover any sherds from the re-
opened sections but identified one piece in mi-
cromorphological sample 6 (figs. S1 to S9). All
pottery is typically tempered with crushed quartz-
ite or feldspar. Firing of the thick, more crude-
ly made earliest pottery was probably carried out
at relatively low temperatures in open fires. The
earlier pottery is plain-surfaced or cord-marked,
but some, from layer 3C1B, have parallel striations
on the interior and exterior surfaces, probably
from smoothing with grass fibers (fig. S1). Al-
though no vessels could be reconstructed, they
had rounded bottoms with walls 0.7 to 1.2 cm
thick. Two vessel-forming techniques can be iden-
tified through visual observation: sheet lam-
inating and coiling with paddling. Many sherds
bear signs of burning on their exterior surface,
possibly indicating their use in cooking. From a
series of in situ bone fragments that we collected
from the exposed profiles in the east and west
trenches, we selected fragments larger than 1 cm
for dating. We also selected similar fragments
that were excavated previously. Because more than
90% of the bones recovered in Xianrendong were
of deer—the largest mammal in the assemblage—
most probably the thick fragments we used for
dating were those of this group, although we
could not identify specific species. Bone was
chosen because it is short-lived, and we dated
fragments of this size because it is unlikely that
Fig. 1. Site map of Xianrendong showing the locations of the west and east sections reopened and
sampled in 2009. Modified from (10) with permission. (Inset) The location of the cave in South China.
Fig. 2. The stratigraphy of the Xianrendong cave west section. Modified from (10) following field
observations made in 2009. Dates indicated are calibrated cal yr B.P. dates calculated by CalPal_HULU
2007. For full information, see Table 1.
www.sciencemag.org SCIENCE VOL 336 29 JUNE 2012 1697
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the stratigraphic integrity of charcoal or bone
samples of this size could have been disturbed
after deposition (see below). Dating was done
in the radiocarbon facility of Peking University
(methodology is presented in the supplementary
materials, section S3). In all, 45 samples have
been dated. Thirteen of these were collected from
the reopened sections in 2009, the dates of which
are tabulated here and compared with samples
collected in the 1999 and 2000 excavations and
previously dated samples from the 1993 and 1995
excavations (8–10). Samples were measured by
the laboratories of Peking University, University
of California, Riverside, and the University of
Arizona (Tables 1 and 2).
The radiocarbon dates suggest that the cave
was in use with minor chronological gaps first
from ~29,000 through Last Glacial Maximum
(LGM) times until ~17,500 cal yr B.P. It was
then abandoned and reoccupied from ~14,500
through 12,000 cal yr B.P. The earliest pottery
appears in the Xianrendong sequence in layers
2B and 2B1 in the east trench and layer 3C1B
in the west trench. The radiocarbon dating shows
that both of these early contexts date to ~20,000
to 19,000 cal yr B.P. (Tables 1 and 2).
In order to assess the integrity and preser-
vation of the layers and the associated samples,
we studied thin sections of 24 micromorpho-
logical samples collected from the west and
east trenches (12–15) (supplementary materials
section S2). Although there are differences be-
tween the depositional sequences of each trench,
the specific sample fabrics imply that the layers
in both trenches had remained stable since dep-
osition, with only minimal cracks on a scale of
millimeters or centimeters. These are not large
enough to affect the large bone fragments used
for radiocarbon dating. In addition, the presence
of intact ice lensing in layer 4B, which prob-
ably formed during the LGM, is further proof
that the sediments have not been significantly
reworked.
Alluvial sediments are present in the earliest
layers of the sequence in both trenches, before
the appearance of pottery (levels 4A and 4B in
the west and 3A in the east trench). Above these
sediments, the deposits in the west trench are
overall similar, with minor changes in texture,
composition, and fabric. They consist of moder-
ately to poorly sorted sandy silty clay, with mm-
to cm-sized inclusions of rock fragments derived
from the cave’s roof and walls. They represent a
mixture of moderately sorted low-energy alluvial
overbank deposits with anthropogenic contribu-
tions (charcoal, bones, sherds, and stone arti-
facts). The presence of bedding in layer 3C1B,
where early pottery sherds, bones, and stone arti-
facts were found, indicates that these deposits
are intact [samples 5 and 6 (16)].
The deposits in the east trench differ mark-
edly from those of the west trench. They are
generally calcareous, except for layer 3A, which
is situated below the pottery bearing layers.
Layer 3A [lower half of sample 19A (16)] is
micaceous and strongly resembles the sediments
from the west trench. A clear break is noted in
the middle of sample 19A (layer 3A, Fig. 2B
and fig. S13), where mica-rich sediment below
changes to calcareous, ash-rich, and mica-poor
sediment above.In these calcareous deposits in
the east trench, the calcite is derived mostly from
anthropogenic ash (accompanied by some char-
coal) rather than from a geological source such
as limestone: Both ash and charcoal indicate a
lack of alluvial sediment, which is abundant in
the western section. The lack of bedding and the
virtual absence of mica in the east section in the
layers from 2B2 and above suggest that most of
the sediments were dumped near the cave wall
by humans and were at least partially shielded
from fluvial processes. It thus seems that the ma-
jor occupation or activity areas at the site were
located further outside the cave, beyond the ex-
cavated zone (Fig. 1), which is characterized by
dumped deposits. This conclusion is supported
by the lack of any intact combustion features
(in spite of the large proportion of calcareous
ashes), the absence of traces of bedding or any
evidence of individual beds, and the mixing of a
variety of materials, such as bone and charcoal:
These components are chaotically arranged on a
centimeter scale, whereas in occupation deposits
they would normally be arranged more contig-
uously in a lateral direction (supplementary ma-
terials section S2).
Evidence of bioturbation by worms or similar-
sized fauna, represented by centimeter-sized pas-
sage features (15), i
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