This may not be news to everyone, but it's news to me: there is a cave site in Hunan province, China, containing potsherds dated to 15,000-18,000 years ago.
Incipient Jomon Pot (10,000-8,000 BC), Tokyo National Museum, Japan. Photo by PRHUp until fairly recently, the earliest recorded pottery was from incipient Jomon period Japan: the Jomon hunter-gatherers (whose name means something like "cord-marked") made and used pottery at their earliest sites ca 12,000 years ago. Scholars had long believed that there would be earlier pottery found on the mainland, and they found it at Yuchanyan Cave south of the Yangtze River. Although likely decorated with cord-impressions, pots weren't glamorous: the potsherds are coarse-pasted, dark brown and shaped like a flower pot with a pointed bottom, something like this later pot in the photo, there researchers found it.
What this does is push pottery making back into the Upper Paleolithic period in China. Some rice grains and rice opal phytoliths were also recovered from Yuchanyan Cave, leading some researchers to begin to look for evidence of early rice cultivation. The association of grain cultivation with pots is sometimes related to the production of alcoholic beverages: but more of that later.
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