In this video Stephan Milo explains the history of the earliest use of pottery by humans, with the oldest pottery being discovered in a cave in eastern China that dates between 29 and 12 thousand years ago, which predates the use of pottery in the West by many thousand of years.

Following are points made in the video:

— The oldest known pottery in the world was found in a cave in eastern China with pottery shards dating between 29 and 12 thousand years old, and pottery first commonly showed up in Eastern Asia at about 20 thousand years ago.  However, the Asians who invented pottery were hunter-gatherers rather than farmers, as the concept of farming had not yet been invented.

— Despite pottery technology previously existing in China, it was not adopted by the initial agricultural peoples of the Levant/Anatolia until 9,000 - 8,500 BC, which was thousands of years after their civilization was first established.

— Pottery as been found in Eastern Russia dating between 16.5 and 10.2 thousand years ago which shows that the people used it to better take advantage of aquatic resources such as preparing fish stew, and other cultures used pottery for stew-type meals consisting of meat from land animals.

— The Paleolithic inhabitants of the current Czech Republic created baked clay statues such as the “Dolni Vestonice” 29,000 years ago, however they only created such figurines and not utilitarian objects.

[Note: I think it is strange that it took so long for such a simple technology as pottery to develop.  I’m suprised that pottery didn’t come about at least in some form as soon as humans figured out how to harness fire.]