Prehistory of China
The earliest human occupation of what is now China dates to the Lower Paleolithic —attested by archaeological finds such as the Yuanmou Man. The Erlitou and Erligang cultures inhabiting the Yellow River valley were Bronze Age civilizations predating the historical record—which first emerges at Yinxu, during the Late Shang.
Paleolithic
The Paleolithic period in palaeogeography refers to the stage of civilization development in which humans began to use stone tools as their main means of labor, and is the early stage of the Stone Age. This period is generally defined as from about 2.6 million or 2.5 million years ago to 12,000 years ago. The division of this period is generally threefold: the Lower, Middle, and Upper Paleolithic, followed by the Mesolithic.Paleolithic humans usually lived together in tribes and subsisted by collecting plants and hunting wildlife. Although humans also used wooden and bone tools within this era, the Paleolithic period is typified by the use of stone tools made by hammering stones. Other materials, such as leather and plant fibers, are also suitable for tooling, but the nature of these materials has prevented them from being used in a wider range of applications. During the Paleolithic period, humans evolved dramatically from early homo sapiens to anatomically modern humans. During the latter stages of the Paleolithic humans began to create the earliest art and became involved in religious and spiritual realms, such as funerals and rituals.
File:Peking Man, reconstitution. AMNH, NY.jpg|thumb|Reconstruction of Peking Man at the American Museum of Natural History, New York.
Early period
The distribution of early Paleolithic cultures in China has been widespread. Chinese Paleolithic cultures dating back to 1 million years BP include the Xihoudou Culture, the Yuanmou Man stone tools, the Kehe Culture, the Lantian Human Culture, and the Donggutuo site. Fewer than 1 million years ago, sites are represented in the north by the Peking Man culture at Zhoukoudian site 1, and in the south by the Guanyin Cave culture at Guanyin Cave in Qianxi, Guizhou. All in all, Chinese Early Paleolithic cultures are basically of a type similar to the Oldowan cultures, and do not seem to display the technological advancements of the Acheulean Culture of the West. However, some scholars believe that there may have been exchanges between the Chinese Paleolithic culture and the Western Acheulean culture during this period.Middle Paleolithic
The Middle Paleolithic culture in China can be represented by the Dingcun site found in Xiangfen, Shanxi Province. Also more important are the Zhoukoudian Locality 15 culture and the Shanxi Yanggao Xujiayao Culture. The Middle Paleolithic cultures of China maintained the types and processing techniques of earlier cultures. Despite slight changes in types and slight advances in technology, they were all slow in progress. One notable feature is the lack of significant development of Levallois technique.Later period
Into the Late Palaeolithic, the number of sites increased, artefacts of visual culture became more abundant and elaborate, technological change took place and the material evidence of cultural types became more diverse from one another. In North China and South China, as well as in other regions, there are cultural types of a similar periodization but with different technological traditions.In north China, there is a tradition of small stone tools inherited from the previous period, the important representatives of which are the Sarawusu site, the Zhiyu culture, the Xiaonanhai site, and the Shandingdong site. There is the Blade culture type, represented by the Shuidonggou culture in Lingwu, Ningxia, which has more than a few similarities with its Western contemporaries. There are also typical microlithic cultures discovered after the 1970s, such as the Xiachuan culture in Qinshui, Shanxi, and the Hutouliang culture at the Hutouliang site in Yangyuan, Hebei.
In the northeast, important sites belonging to this period include the Xiaogushan site in Haicheng, Liaoning, and the Yanjiagang site in Harbin, Heilongjiang.
In the south, several regional cultures emerged during this period, such as the Fulin culture type named after the Fulin site in Hanyuan, Sichuan, the Tongliang culture type represented by the Zhang Ertang site in Tongliang, Chongqing, and the Maomao culture type initially discovered at the Maomao site in Xingyi, Guizhou.
In addition, a number of Paleolithic cultural sites belonging to this period or slightly later have been found in Tibet, Xinjiang and Qinghai. In general, the main characteristic of the cultures of this period is that, with the exception of a few sites, the production of blade crafts and bone and horn tools was not very well developed.
Mesolithic
The Mesolithic period in China, between the Upper Paleolithic and Early Neolithic, was characterized by the manufacture of microliths, and is therefore also known as the "Microlith Period". China was in the Mesolithic period from about 10,000 to 7,000 years ago, with cultures successively entering the Neolithic period after one or two millennia, a relatively brief span of time. There are also the Shayuan Culture of Shayuan in Dali, Shaanxi, the Lingjing Culture of Lingjing in Xuchang, Henan, and the Xiachuan Culture of Xiachuan in Qinshui, Shanxi.Neolithic
The Neolithic period was characterized by a gradual progression from food gathering to food production, and by the development of stone tools from rudimentary to specialized. With the advent of agriculture, people had a more reliable food supply; The emergence of long-term tribes led to the complexity of living in groups; people began to use abstract symbols to represent concrete things, and representational art emerged. The Neolithic 'revolution' was a major juncture in human history.Peiligang and Cishan cultures
The Peiligang culture and the Cishan culture are the earliest Neolithic cultures in China that have been seen in archaeology so far. Both cultures already had agriculture, but the large number of excavations of tree seeds, fish bones, and animal bones indicate that gathering food was still of considerable importance. The presence of agricultural tools, grains, and domestic animals signifies that a significant portion of food was already supplied by production. Early Neolithic pottery was handmade, but it was fired to more than, and the forms were already quite complex, with a number of motifs and even a few paintings. Many of the pottery forms of the Peiligang culture and the Cishan culture are also found in the later Yangshao culture, where rope patterns and colorful paintings are even more prevalent. Round and square semisubterranian dwelling sites also originated in the Peiligang and Cishan cultures, while the same is seen in the village sites of the Yangshao culture. All of this shows that Peiligang culture and Cishan culture are the predecessors of Yangshao culture. The Peiligang culture sites are mainly located in the central part of Henan. In terms of the age determined by carbon-14 dating, Peiligang culture has three data of 5935±480 BCE, 5195±300 BCE and 7350±1000 BCE. Roughly contemporaneous with Peiligang, the Egou Beigang culture is 5315–5025 BCE. The main artifacts of Peiligang culture are stone grinding discs with feet, stone grinding poles, narrow and flat stone shovels with double curved edges and stone scythes with serrated teeth, which are obviously tools related to agricultural production, and their pottery assemblage includes figurines of pigs' heads.- The Jiahu Gudi unearthed at the Jiahu site between 7,000 and 5,700 years ago is the earliest, best-preserved and most numerous musical instrument in the world that can still be used for playing. The excavated tortoiseshell has 16 Jiahu symbols dated to about 6600 BCE, but they cannot be conclusively identified as writing.
- The main sites of the Cishan site are located in the southern part of Hebei and the northern part of Henan. The data for the site of the Cishan culture are dated to 5405–5110 BCE. In the cellar of the Cishan culture site, middens of decayed grains were unearthed, which were judged to be probably corn. A large number of pig and dog skeletons were also unearthed at Cishan. As the relationship between the Cishan culture and the Peiligang culture is close, some scholars have advanced the idea of a singular "Peiligang–Cishan culture", while others believe that they are two different cultural types with some common features. Overall, it seems that the Peiligang culture is closer to the later part of the Cishan culture.
Yangshao culture
The Yangshao culture significantly developed agriculture. The villages were quite large, on the order of square kilometers. Dwelling sites are usually square or round and semisubterranian, divided into inner and outer chambers, with flat or even chalky floors. Chambers often have the remains of burnt fires. Tribes were often located on river terraces. In some cases, sites in good condition can encompass several non-contiguous cultural layers, suggesting that agriculture was practiced in the form of nomadic cultivation. But tribal migration often depended on conditions favorable to farming, so that the same site could be occupied successively by people moving in to establish a settled tribe.
The site at Banpo, Xi'an, Shaanxi, has at least two cultural layers, with the ruins and cellars of one layer superimposed on the remains of the other, separated by layers of soil alternately lush with grass seeds and tree pollen. Only with the "slash-and-burn" method of cultivation is it possible to have this kind of alternation of trees and grass on the same site. The Banpo Tribe may have had hundreds of dwelling sites, with the domiciles and storage caves concentrated in the center of the settlement, surrounded by a deep ditch. To the north of the Banpo site, there is a communal cemetery, where the remains of children and adults are buried, and the territory of the living and the dead is clearly separated. There is also a large house in the village, which may have served as a meeting place for the whole village, or some other public function. It is inferred that the tribes of Yangshao culture seem to have had a certain degree of Political organisation and a sense of self-grouping. The phenomenon of burial in cemeteries reflects group consciousness having transcended the boundaries of time.
Agriculture at Yangshao was dominated by the cultivation of millet and other grains; storage caves at several sites have yielded millet-type grains. Pottery jars for storing vegetable seeds have also been excavated at the Banpo site. Livestock were mostly pigs and dogs, with fewer cows and sheep. Agricultural tools include stone hoes and shovels for plowing, stone knives and axes for felling, and stone sharpeners for general scraping. Yangshao agriculture was productive to such a level that storage caves are found distributed all throughout the villages, clearly indicating surplus food supply. Yangshao culture pottery often have painted decoration. For this reason, archaeologists once referred to Yangshao culture as "colored pottery culture". Motifs include geometric shapes and flowing irregular lines, as well as fairly realistic or pictorial images, such as fish, pigs, frogs, sheep, human heads, and the like. Several of these rudimentary engravings and paintings have symbolic functions, to the point that certain scholars consider Yangshao pottery patterns a form of writing. On the whole, Yangshao culture in the social organization, production level and the use of abstract symbols have a considerable degree of development. Yangshao culture has a long history and is dominant in the Central Plains, and has had a non-negligible influence on the Neolithic cultures of the surrounding neighboring regions.