18,000–9500 BCE: (The Global Sequence of Ceramic Invention: First in the Yangtze Valley of China Around 18,000 BCE, Second in the Amur River Region of Northe…

18,000–9500 BCE: (The Global Sequence of Ceramic Invention: First in the Yangtze Valley of China Around 18,000 BCE, Second in the Amur River Region of Northern East Asia Around 14,500 to 12,000 BCE with Subsequent Spread to Japan, the Lowered Ice Age Ocean Levels Connecting Sakhalin and Japan to the Asian Mainland as a Peninsula with No Sea Barriers to Technological Diffusion, and Shared Basketry-Imitative Decoration Styles Suggesting Common Origin in the Northern Tradition): Ehret is scrupulously fair about the global sequence. The very first invention of ceramics did not take place in Africa but in East Asia. Recent discoveries place the beginnings of this development at around 18,000 BCE in areas around the Yangtze valley of China. By around 14,500 to 12,000 BCE, peoples living across a second set of East Asian lands had also begun to produce pottery, with their earliest known wares found at sites in the Amur River region, more than 1,500 kilometers north of the Yangtze valley, and with a subsequent spread of pottery making to Japan. Ehret pauses here to offer some geographical context that most readers will not know. During this period, because of the lowered ocean levels of the Ice Age, Sakhalin and the islands of Japan formed a peninsula extending south from the lower Amur region of the Asian mainland, one that may at times have also connected to the mainland through Korea. There was no Yellow Sea; instead, dry land connected modern Korea to northern China and areas farther north. In other words, there were no sea barriers to the movement of people or technology across these regions. Shared ceramic decoration styles, imitative of basketry patterns, strongly suggest a common origin across this northern zone. But across the wide expanse of lands between the Yangtze and the Amur River regions, the earliest pottery yet known is still later in time, so the more northerly development seems likely to have been independent of the Yangtze invention, making it the second-earliest such invention in world history rather than a diffusion from the south.