Examples of pottery found in a cave at Yuchanyan in China's Hunan province may be the oldest known to science.
By determining the fraction of a type, or isotope, of carbon in bone fragments and charcoal, the specimens were found to be 17,500 to 18,300 years old.
The authors say that the ages are more precise than previous efforts because a series of more than 40 radiocarbon-dated samples support the estimate.
The work is reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The Yuchanyan cave was the site where the oldest kernels of rice were found in 2005, and it is viewed as an important link between cave-dwelling hunter-gatherer peoples and the farmers that arose later in the basin of the nearby Yangtze River.
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