HUDDLED around the fire, early man would sooner or later have noticed the way that soft, malleable clay close to the embers baked into a hard, durable material. A member of the group might even have idly squeezed a handful of wet clay into an appealing shape and tossed it into the ashes. The earliest known examples of such fired-clay figurines are 27,000 years old and come from central Europe.
These discoveries tell archaeologists something about early man's cultural development, and perhaps even about his spiritual ideas. But they do not add much to knowledge about hunter-gatherers' way of life, about what they ate or, most crucially, about whether and when they took the first tentative steps towards a more sedentary form of existence. For that, archaeologists need to find things such as the remnants of water-carrying pots—which, being heavy to lug around, rarely feature in a hunter's life.
Until recently, the oldest known clay pot in the world was a 14,000-year-old vessel from the middle reaches of the Yangtze river in China. But over the past week, researchers at Kokugakuin University and Nagoya University have confirmed, by carbon-14 dating of their soot coatings, that some pieces of earthenware found last year in Aomori prefecture in northern Japan date back 16,500 years.
Finding the world's oldest known cooking pot, even in pieces, is exciting. But the bigger significance of the Aomori discovery lies elsewhere. As with other pieces of early Japanese pottery, one feature of the Aomori find is the exquisite rope-like pattern pressed into its surface for decoration. The Japanese word for this, jomon (chord-markings), has been used to describe the era that stretched from the end of the ice age, around 13,000 years ago, to about 300 BC.
The latest discovery pushes the dawn of the Jomon era in Japan back 3,500 years—to a period when glaciers were rampant in much of the northern hemisphere. But the leisure and sedentary existence that the Jomon would have required for their pottery have generally been supposed to result from climatic changes at the end of the ice age. These raised the sea level, producing Japan's meandering modern coastline with its prolific crops of shellfish and edible seaweed, and also permitted the spread of deciduous forests, which provide a cornucopia of nuts, berries and shoots that do not run away. That the Jomon had the leisure to create their pots before these changes happened suggests they were smarter and more settled than archaeologists had realised. Which makes their eventual, rapid displacement by the Korean immigrants who were the ancestors of most modern Japanese a puzzle.
This article appeared in the Science and technology section of the print edition under the headline "A potted history"