Newly discoveredsherdsof clayware found at the Real Alto site in Ecuador add more weight to the estimate that an as - yet - unknown culture existed in the orbit 6,500 years ago . The findings have been publish in the journalAntiquity .
A squad of international archaeologist find more than 40 shard from several vas , which have been radiocarbon dated to 4640 - 4460 BCE . The squad say this timing border or coincides with the very earliest stage ofValdivia culture(circa . 4400 – 1600 BCE ) – a prehistorical residential district know for theircarved stone figurines , which are believed to be birthrate form .
However , the coloring and style of the pottery is typical from that of Valdivian clayware , which tends to be reddened - slipped and burnished and is more often grace with measured , smooth - sided incision . Instead , the newly expose shards are black or fatal - and - brown in color and are made from grog and Harlan Fiske Stone toughness .
The archaeologists say that while they may not resemble Validivian holding , they do have a batch in vulgar with fragments collected from Real Alto and elsewhere in the 1970s and eighties , which ( so far ) have n’t been ascribed to any one culture . This suggests the sherds add together more evidence to the hypotheses that there was another archaeological culture at that time , who existed alongside the Valdivia on Ecuador ’s Pacific sea-coast .
The team now hope to find more relics that can be unite to this new culture , and possibly pottery from even more ancient times . This , they say , could help them find out whether or not clayware was discovered in South America at the same fourth dimension as it was being discovered in other part of the world , or if it was being imported .
" The volume emergence of clayware was a kind of technological breakthrough associated with many aspects of human biography and the spirit level of economical exploitation in different parts of the orb , " Alexander Popov – Head of the Russian archaeological jaunt to Ecuador , Director of the Educational and Scientific Museum at the Far Eastern Federal University , Russia – said ina program line .
" Ceramic vas belong to different culture which developed simultaneously confirm that our ascendant had evolved in terms of cultural multifariousness . It is curious that , despite the unlike vector of human development , in the technological sentience we were moving in the same guidance . "
Indeed , by 4640 BCE , neolithic human being in Europe had been usingceramic and pottery to salt away boozy beveragesfor centuries .
