Neolithic China

Neolithic China

The Neolithic Age that began in China about 12,000 years ago was marked by the spread of settled agricultural communities. At the time the Yellow and Yangzi Rivers had not yet deposited all the alluvial soil that today forms the plains between the western and eastern mountain chains. Today's North China plain between Shanxi* and Shandong was mainly lakes and marshes - Shangdong was almost an island off the coast. Today's provinces of Hebei and Henan were still fens not easily habitable. Meanwhile, the central China section of the Yangzi was an enormous lake. Today's provinces of Hubei and Hunan were not yet cultivable, even for rice. The mountains were well forested, and animals were plentiful. Domestication of animals like the dog and pig was a minor problem compared with the domestication of crops. The hardy perennial plants that hunter-fisher-gatherer communities might have gradually begun to use for food had to be substituted by annual seed crops that could be regularly planted and harvested - in short, cultivated. At this time the fairly warm and moist climate of Paleolithic China had not yet shifted to the more arid and colder climate of the present day. Neolithic agriculture could start most easily in marginal areas where upland forest gave way to cultivable grassland and where an abundance of plants and animals could sustain human live with or without successful farming.

Discoveries at thousands of Neolithic sites show a beginning of settled agriculture below the southern bend of the Yellow River, on a border between wooded highlands and swampy lowlands. For example, the villagers of Banpo (now in the city of Xi'an) about 4000 BC lived on millet supplemented by hunting and fishing. They used hemp for fabrics. Dwellings were grouped in clusters that suggest kinship units. Arrowheads indicate hunting with bows. The villagers raised pigs and dogs as their principal domesticated animals and stored their grain in pottery jars decorated with fish, animal, and plant designs as well as symbols that were evidently clan or lineage markers. But this "Painted Pottery" (called Yangshao) culture of North China was paralleled by contemporary cultures found at sites on the southeast coast and Taiwan and in the lower Yanzi valley, where rice culture had already begun.

Overlying the Painted Pottery has been found a thinner, lustrous Black Pottery (called Longshan) more widely distributed throughout North China, the Yangzi valley, and even the southeast coast, indicating a great expansion of Neolithic agriculture with many regional subcultures. Thus, it seems that neolithic China developed in several centers from Paleolithic origins.

Another achievement of Neolithic China was silk production.

*Names of provinces commonly use shan mountains, xi west, dong east, he river, bet north, nan south, and hu lake. Shanxi is "west of the mountains." Hunan is "south of the lake."