5 South Korean Pottery Masters

[SRBrant]

A potter? Awesome!

But if you want REALLY awesome pottery, look up "Jomon" and "Haniwa." The Japanese are perhaps the oldest and greatest potters on Earth.

They are the oldest. Pottery was invented in prehistoric Japan and permeated throughout the world long before the beginning of history.

I knew that.

[Masato]

Well China pre-dates Japan, no?

Whatever Japan can boast about I would bet China has older and more masterful work

but I'm just talkin out of my ass I don;t know for sure

Would not Chinese pottery be older than Japanese?

[SRBrant]

Actually, Japanese pottery dates back to 3000 and perhaps even 8000 BCE!

Or so I have read.

[Luigi]

SRB is right. It would be much closer to 8000 BCE. It predates the late stages of Near Eastern proto-civilizations, which ranged from c.5500 BCE to 4000 BCE.

[Masato]

Then I am all fucked up

I had it in my head all along from watching martial arts movies ( :) ) that Japan was a younger sub-culture/split from China. That China pre-dated it by a lot and that Japan was like an offspring of those old dynasties

Is this totally wrong?

[Masato]

I actually remember asking my wife about this and I think she said the same; that pottery in China is older

not sure if I heard her correctly

[Luigi]

Chinese civilization pre-dates Japanese civilization, but people tend to think that before civilization was nothing but dudes running around in loin clothes throwing spears at shit. This is very incorrect. Every bit of human progress before the industrial revolution was a very slow and gradual process. For example, a basic village life with domesticated plants and animals developed in east Anatolia about 10,000 years before "true civilization". This is because of how we classify civilization. In order to be a civilization, you have to meet all the criteria on the historian's checklist. The one that seems to always take the longest to develop is the systematic use of writing. You will often see ancient Egypt listed as one of the first civilizations, in reality they lagged behind the rest of the east Mediterranean and fertile crescent in almost every category for thousands of years of "proto-civilization", but when they finally caught up they were one of the first to develop writing.