Food residues offer a taste of pottery’s diverse origins in East Asia
Pottery making may not have emerged in one Big Bang–like event. Instead, it was more like a cluster of ceramic eruptions among ancient East Asian hunter-gatherer groups as the last Ice Age waned, a new study suggests. East Asian hunter-gatherer populations living about 700 kilometers apart made and used cooking pots in contrasting ways between around 16,200 and 10,200 years ago, says a team led by Shinya Shoda, an archaeologist currently based at the University of York in England. Each of those groups probably invented its own distinctive pottery-making techniques, the scientists suspect. “Our results indicate that there was greater variability in the development and use of early pottery than has been appreciated,” Shoda says. Pieces of ceramic cooking pots from one group preserved chemical markers of fish, including salmon, Shoda’s group reports in the Feb. 1 Quaternary Science Reviews. Early pottery making by those hunter-gatherers accompanied seasonal harvests of migrating fish, the researchers say. Fatty acids extracted from remnants of a second group’s pots came from...