Early pottery at 11,200 years ago in the Southern Mongolian Plateau

he invention of pottery played a crucial role in human history, promoting human settlement and the transition to an agricultural society [1,2]. Pottery first emerged in East Asia during the Late Pleistocene/Paleolithic across a diverse range of environmental settings, becoming more widespread with the climatic warming of the Holocene/Neolithic [3]. The relatively cold Mongolian Plateau was a key region for early human adaptation. Here, numerous archaeological sites have been discovered since the Upper Palaeolithic, including the earliest pottery sites dating back to approximately 12,000 years ago in the northern areas [4,5]. However, no pottery sites predating 10,000 cal a BP have been discovered in the hinterland and southern regions. This spatio-temporal gap poses a challenge to understanding pottery development and human interactions on the plateau following the global cooling of the Younger Dryas (YD) (12.9–11.6 cal ka BP) and the subsequent transition to the warmer Holocene. Our study presents new evidence from a pottery site, called the Dali Lake site in the southern Mongolian Plateau. The radiocarbon dates of the archaeological contexts of the pottery shards are 11,753–11,298 cal a BP, bridging the chronological gap between 12,000 and 10,000 years ago in the plateau and providing the earliest evidence of pottery production and Neolithic human occupation in Nei Mongol.