One of the top ten inventions of the world, as far as I'm concerned, is ceramic containers. The earliest of these are bag-shaped, and a good guess (unsubstantiated because, of course, I can't talk to anybody from 20,000 years ago about their creative spark) would be that they were modeled on net bags.
Pottery fragment from Xianrendong, layer 3C1B. Ten radiocarbon dates from this layer range between 17,488-19,577 cal BP. Image courtesy of Science/AAAS
Up until recently, the earliest known ceramics came from the island of Japan, associated with Jomon hunter-gatherers of around 17,000 years ago. Archaeologists have suspected for years that the technology arose on the mainland: and archaeological evidence from two sites in the Yangtse River valley of China have been found recently, a few thousand years earlier than incipient Jomon.
The sherd illustrated above comes from the Xianrendong Cave, reported in the June 29, 2012 issue of Science magazine to be securely dated to ~20,000 years ago.
Wu X, Zhang C, Goldberg P, Cohen D, Pan Y, Arpin T, and Bar-Yosef O. 2012. Early pottery at 20,000 years ago in Xianrendong Cave, China. Science 336:1696-1700.
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Thanks for this tidbit of news. I had been aware of prehistoric rock art but didn’t realise the technology of ceramics/pottery was quite as old as it now appears. Time to adjust my mental timeline again