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Xiaohong Wu2012 Early Pottery at 20,000 Years Ago in Xianrendong Cave, China DOI: 10.1126/science.1218643 , 1696 (2012);336 Science et al.Xiaohong Wu Early Pottery at 20,000 Years Ago in Xianrendong Cave, China This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. clicking here.colleagues, clients, or customers by , you can ...

Xiaohong Wu2012 Early Pottery at 20,000 Years Ago in Xianrendong Cave, China
DOI: 10.1126/science.1218643 , 1696 (2012);336 Science et al.Xiaohong Wu Early Pottery at 20,000 Years Ago in Xianrendong Cave, China This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. clicking here.colleagues, clients, or customers by , you can order high-quality copies for yourIf you wish to distribute this article to others here.following the guidelines can be obtained byPermission to republish or repurpose articles or portions of articles ): June 28, 2012 www.sciencemag.org (this information is current as of The following resources related to this article are available online at http://www.sciencemag.org/content/336/6089/1696.full.html version of this article at: including high-resolution figures, can be found in the onlineUpdated information and services, http://www.sciencemag.org/content/suppl/2012/06/27/336.6089.1696.DC1.html can be found at: Supporting Online Material http://www.sciencemag.org/content/336/6089/1696.full.html#related found at: can berelated to this article A list of selected additional articles on the Science Web sites http://www.sciencemag.org/content/336/6089/1696.full.html#ref-list-1 , 3 of which can be accessed free:cites 22 articlesThis article http://www.sciencemag.org/content/336/6089/1696.full.html#related-urls 1 articles hosted by HighWire Press; see:cited by This article has been http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/collection/anthro Anthropology subject collections:This article appears in the following registered trademark of AAAS. is aScience2012 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science; all rights reserved. The title CopyrightAmerican Association for the Advancement of Science, 1200 New York Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20005. (print ISSN 0036-8075; online ISSN 1095-9203) is published weekly, except the last week in December, by theScience o n J un e 28 , 2 01 2 w w w .s ci en ce m ag .o rg D ow nl oa de d fro m 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. References and Notes 1. S. B. Hedges, J. E. Blair, M. L. Venturi, J. L. Shoe, BMC Evol. Biol. 4, 2 (2004). 2. K. J. Peterson, N. J. Butterfield, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 102, 9547 (2005). 3. K. J. Peterson, J. A. Cotton, J. G. Gehling, D. Pisani, Philos. Trans. R. Soc. B 363, 1435 (2008). 4. J.-Y. Chen et al., Science 305, 218 (2004). 5. D. Condon et al., Science 308, 95 (2005). 6. T. Huldtgren et al., Science 334, 1696 (2011). 7. S. Xiao, A. H. Knoll, J. D. Schiffbauer, Ch. Zhou, X. Yuan, Science 335, 1169; author reply 1169 (2012). 8. M. D. Brasier, D. McIlroy, J. Geol. Soc. London 155, 5 (1998). 9. A. G. Liu, D. McIlroy, M. D. Brasier, Geology 38, 123 (2010). 10. G. J. Retallack, Geology 38, e223 (2010). 11. S. Jensen, M. L. Droser, J. G. Gehling, Palaeogeogr. Palaeoclimatol. Palaeoecol. 220, 19 (2005). 12. M. A. Fedonkin, B. M. Waggoner, Nature 388, 868 (1997). 13. M. W. Martin et al., Science 288, 841 (2000). 14. Materials and methods are available as supplementary materials on Science Online. 15. G. Veroslavsky, H. de Santa Ana, G. Daners, Rev. Soc. Uru. Geol. 13, 23 (2006). 16. S. Jensen, M. L. Droser, J. G. Gehling, in Neoproterozoic Geobiology and Paleobiology, S. Xiao, A. J. Kaufman, Eds. (Springer, New York, 2006), pp. 115–157. 17. S. Jensen, T. Palacios, M. Martí Mus, in The Rise and Fall of the Ediacaran Biota, P. Vickers-Rich, P. Komarower, Eds. (Special Publication, Geological Society of London, 2007), pp. 223–235. 18. S. Bengtson, B. Rasmussen, B. Krapež, Paleobiology 33, 351 (2007). 19. M. V. Matz, T. M. Frank, N. J. Marshall, E. A. Widder, S. Johnsen, Curr. Biol. 18, 1849 (2008). 20. A. G. Collins, J. H. Lipps, J. W. Valentine, Paleobiology 26, 47 (2000). 21. G. M. Narbonne, J. D. Aitken, Palaeontology 33, 945 (1990). 22. M. L. Droser, J. G. Gehling, S. Jensen, in Evolving Form and Function: Fossils and Development, D. E. G. Briggs, Ed. (Peabody Museum of Natural History, New Haven, CT, 2005), pp. 125–138. 23. G. D. Love et al., Nature 457, 718 (2009). 24. A. C. Maloof et al., Nat. Geosci. 3, 653 (2010). 25. G. M. Narbonne, Annu. Rev. Earth Planet. Sci. 33, 421 (2005). 26. D. E. Canfield, S. W. Poulton, G. M. Narbonne, Science 315, 92 (2007). 27. K. A. McFadden et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 105, 3197 (2008). 28. Y. Shen, T. Zhang, P. F. Hoffman, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 105, 7376 (2008). 29. L. M. Och, G. A. Shields-Zhou, Earth Sci. Rev. 110, 26 (2012). 30. M. Gingras et al., Nat. Geosci. 4, 372 (2011). 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 REPORTS o n J un e 28 , 2 01 2 w w w .s ci en ce m ag .o rg D ow nl oa de d fro m 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 REPORTS o n J un e 28 , 2 01 2 w w w .s ci en ce m ag .o rg D ow nl oa de d fro m 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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