15,000-year-old pottery used for cooking

I was reading the news this morning and came across a really neat anthropological discovery. Scientists found pottery fragments dating back to about 13000 BC from a hunter-gatherer society in Japan. They did chemical analysis on the fragments and actually found that there are charred remnants of food with amino acids commonly found in seafood (which would be consistent with what a society near the coast of Japan would eat). How COOL is that?! It totally revolutionizes the idea that pottery originated from the Middle East-- now it looks like East Asian hunter-gatherers may have discovered pottery and introduced it to the western world. SO interesting! I wish that Aubs was a bit older so that we could do a "current events" project on it!

Credit: Tokamachi City Museum

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/349564/description/Pottery_cooked_from_the_start