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ОглавлениеCHAPTER 2
China’s Early Agriculture
The Dawn of Domesticated Grain
In China, at the same time, men and women were domesticating rice and millets, developing the first farming systems, and probably experimenting with other early farming activities. Soon afterward, in the Americas, men and women domesticated maize, potatoes, chiles, llamas…. The list goes on.
In the early and hopeful days of Chinese communism, Mao Zedong and his henchmen paid some lip service to “the Chinese people” and their “creativity.” However little they may have meant it—Mao’s own real hero was Qin Shi Huang Di, of whom more anon—it did make some people think, for a while. Alas, history and anthropology have returned to their more usual role of remembering only the famous names. Recent history books rehearse the old Imperial litany of hapless monarchs captive to their eunuchs and merciless generals decimating provinces. This is a pity. The ordinary people not only survived, but, year after year, dynasty after dynasty, fed the predatory elites. At best, this activity brought them peace, progress, and some prosperity. More often, it brought them more robbery and violence.
The great discoveries of history are those made by nameless farmers, craftspeople, cooks, and workers of every sort. Yet, also, from early times, China actually had government-sponsored agricultural experiments, manuals, extension services, and statistics. Unlike the West, it had an ideology favoring agriculture.
Archaeology, and a strikingly large amount of textual and documentary material, can now give us better images of ordinary life in old China. The present book cannot ignore elites, but I will attempt to move the balance a bit—to bring to consciousness the now silent millions who gave so much.
Early Farming in China
Immediately before agriculture, the people of what is now northern China were living on acorns, wild yams, wild grass seeds, and wild beans, as well as game and fish. The plants have been identified from starch grains on grinding stones (Liu 2012). Ropes, nets, and woven fabrics were presumably present; they are documented in nearby Russia from comparably early periods, up to 9,400–8,400 years ago (Kuzmin et al. 2012).
Agriculture began in two separate locations in China with two quite different crops. This might have been two different domestication events, or two local manifestations of an earlier, single event. Evidence at present points to the former conclusion, but we really do not know. The two locations were in the dry Yellow River drainage of the north and the moist, warm Yangzi drainage of the south (on Neolithic and early urban China, see Liu and Chen 2012; Underhill 2013). In the former, millets were the domesticates. “Millet” is a catchall term for any grain with small seeds—significantly smaller than those of wheat. There are a good half dozen millets in China, not very closely related to each other. Foxtail millet (Setaria italica) was probably domesticated first, being a better grain all round, but panic, or broomcorn, millet (Panicum miliaceum) was almost or quite as early. Both are well adapted to the dry, summer-hot, winter-cold north. Broomcorn millet spread rapidly west across the steppes, reaching Europe by 4000 BCE. In China, it was never adopted far from the dry northern interior. Foxtail did not spread west till much later; preferring more rain and warmth, it moved south instead, becoming important throughout China in later millennia. It eventually became a minor but significant grain in the uplands of Southeast Asia and locally in Central Asia and Europe.
In north China, agriculture began by 8000 BCE, possibly before 9000 (see, e.g., Crawford and Shen 1998; Higham and Lu 1998; Liu 2004; Liu and Chen 2012). Foxtail millet was domesticated by 8000–7500 BCE (K.-c. Chang 1999: 44–45; Liu 2004; X. Liu et al. 2009; T. Lu 2005; see Sagart et al. 2005, passim; Yan 2002; Zhao 2011). The early center of foxtail millet agriculture is a large area, from the Wei River Valley down the Yellow River and then south into the Huai River drainage.
Domesticated broomcorn millet may go back to 8500 BCE, but the finds are not securely attested (Zhao 2011). It was domesticated in northern China or Central Asia, somewhere between the Aral Sea and the Tian Shan. Genetic comparison of existing strains seems to pinpoint domestication there, and this seems logical given the early appearance of the grain in both China and Europe (Kimata 2012 and pers. comm.). Along the Yellow River, the Cishan culture may have been growing Panicum miliaceum as early as 8300 BP (around 6500 BCE; Bettinger et al. 2010: 703; Zhao 2011).
“Panic” is just the Latin root for “millet”—it has nothing to do with the Greek word for extreme fear. (The latter came from the god Pan; he keeps people away from his favorite spots by giving them an irrational terror when they go there.) Millet is a pretty obvious thing to domesticate; in pre-Columbian times, a foxtail millet was briefly domesticated in Mexico, and P. sonorum was independently domesticated on the Lower Colorado River. Interestingly, foxtail millet was replaced by maize in Mexico around 3000–2000 BCE, and then in China in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries CE. Also, several related (but different) millets were independently domesticated in Africa and India.
New data show that agriculture may even have been earlier than that. Starch grains on pots and grinding stones show extensive use, implying cultivation and some dependence, by 9500–9000 BCE at Nanzhuang tou, and 9500–7000 at Donghulin (Xiaoyan Yang et al. 2012). If this evidence means what it seems to mean, agriculture was at least as early in north-central China as in the Near East.
For this time period and later, Ian Morris, in his “big history,” Why the West Rules … For Now, provides a chart purporting to show that the Near East was always earlier than China is every advance except pottery and “rich grave goods” (Morris 2010: 130; he thinks the reason pottery came earlier in the East was that the Easterners boiled food more). Unfortunately, much of this is at best speculative (including the boiling). Leaving aside some errors, the whole chart depends on the luck of the excavation. Archaeology is far more developed in the Near East. Moreover, China’s archaeology is handicapped by the intensive occupation of the landscape. It is good for the residents that China’s first real city—Zhengzhou—persists today as a flourishing metropolis, far bigger than it was in 1500 BCE, but it certainly does not help archaeologists! The Near East was ahead in many things, but the domestication of plants may not have been one of them.
Both kinds of millets were widespread and basic to many local cultures by 6000 BCE. The Peiligang culture, in the upper Huai drainage, flourished in 7000–5000 BCE and, along with Cishan, “signals the emergence of food production and ritual complexity in the region” (Liu et al. 2010: 816–17). However, much of the food of the Peiligang people comprised acorns, as shown by abundant acorn starch grains in their well-made grinding stones (Liu 2012; Liu et al. 2010). Acorns are still somewhat widely used in China; in ancient Zhejiang they were made into an acorn jelly (Liu et al. 2010: 830), evidently similar to that which remains a common food in Korea today. In any case, in Peiligang the acorns and wild yams of an earlier age were suddenly and dramatically supplemented (but not replaced!) by great quantities of domesticated millet and rice (Liu 2012). The Peiligang and other early cultures had small settlements, 1–8 ha in size. Agriculture reached Inner Mongolia by around 6000 BCE (Xinglongwa culture; Shelach et al. 2011). Here and elsewhere, tree crops were so important in those days that Li Liu suspects deliberate tree management—resource husbandry—as in ancient California (Liu and Chen 2012: 265–67).
Around 5500 BCE, people, pigs, and dogs in central north China suddenly shifted toward eating a lot more millet. One way we know is that their bones all show markers of subsistence on plants that use the C4 pathway of carbon metabolism (Barton et al. 2008; Jing and Campbell 2009). (C4 is found largely among tropical grasses. Most other plants use the C3 pathway.) In this area, the only common C4 plants are millets, so this is evidence for reliance on agriculture. Wild plants and other cultigens in the area are C3. The only other important C4 plant in China is maize, which did not reach China until the sixteenth or seventeenth century CE. Jing and Campbell (2009: 101) report a very odd case of two skeletons showing a C3 diet among the many showing C4. Were these strangers? Hunter-gatherers from the uplands? Migrants from rice regions to the south?
At Dadiwan, we have the unique advantage of an almost continuous record of 80,000 years. Dadiwan is in the dry loess plateau lands (around 20” annual rainfall) of the Wei River drainage, northwest of Xi’an, but the climate was wetter during at least some of the Neolithic period. The site shows millet agriculture appearing slowly from 5500 BCE and intensifying between 5000 and 4000 into full Neolithic (Bettinger et al. 2010). Most of the loess plateaus of interior China were grassy or brushy, with sagebrush steppes and wild jujube scrub. These dominated on level lands. On loess soil, rainwater seeps in quickly and deeply, leaving the surface both dry and fire prone. In areas as dry as this, grass takes over. The steeper slopes were brushy, because water ran off too fast to allow much tree growth. (In addition to cited sources, I have my own observations of the loess plateaus to go by, as well as careful scanning of satellite photographs. For magnificent photographs of Chinese Neolithic sites and objects, see Yan 2002; Zhang Zhongpei 2002.)
However, the vast loess plateau is broken by many valleys and ravines and by higher hills and mountains. These were, and sometimes still are, densely forested. At Dadiwan (which has an archaeological record from 6000 to 1800 BCE) and nearby Xishanping, there is a good record of pollen and charcoal from 3200 to 2200. It reveals that the area had surprisingly diverse and rich forests, dominated by maple, elm, oak, and similar trees (Liu et al. 2013). Hazelnuts, chestnuts, wild cherries, and acorns from the oaks would have provided food. Most of these were probably on the hill and mountain ranges. Spruce and birch were common higher on the ranges, indicating cool moist conditions there. A wetter climate had also allowed warm-temperate plants like bamboo and sweetgum to flourish in the valleys, now totally farmed. Today, any area not too steep to be terraced is now used intensively for agriculture. This area is now cold and dry.
Rice (Oryza sativa) was domesticated somewhere in or near the Yangzi River drainage. Theories of Southeast Asian or Indian origin and of multiple sites of domestication have now been disproved; recent archaeology and genetic analysis (Molina et al. 2011) suggest that domestication was a single event that occurred in central China around 6000–7000 BCE.
Rice was cultivated and very possibly domesticated by around 8000 BCE (K.-c. Chang 1999: 46; Jiang and Liu 2006, earliest site, Shangshan in Zhejiang; Liu 2004; T. Lu 2005, 2011; MacNeish and Libby 1995; Yan 2002). Crawford (2006), Zhao (2011), and many others doubt domestication by this early date, finding certainty only by 6500 BCE, but Kuzmin (2008a) has definite evidence for it by 7000 BCE. It is now clear that China, specifically the Yangzi Valley and environs, was the place of origin of domesticated rice and of rice agriculture, though rice was quite early in the Yellow River drainage also (Liu and Chen 2012). A recent paper by Xuehui Huang et al. (2012) maintains that rice was domesticated in the Pearl River drainage, but their collections of wild rice (Oryza rufipogon, the known ancestor of O. sativa) were all from south China; there is so little purely wild rice in the Yangzi Valley that they apparently could not find any to sample. Genetics confirms that rice was first cultivated there and spread from there throughout China, then Korea and Southeast Asia, and finally South Asia and—in historic times—the rest of the world (Molina et al. 2011).
From earliest times, rice was divided into japonica and indica varieties; these are different enough that they are difficult to cross. They show up as clearly different by 5000 BCE or soon after. Xuehui Huang et al. (2012) found that japonica was the original domesticate and think that indica developed by outcrossing to local varieties in Southeast and, later, South Asia. However, they may very well have been different wild types from different areas, since they are so different that it is hard to imagine them differentiating by 5000 BCE under cultivation; rice cultivation was very new at the time. Again one may suppose that the crossing took place earlier and farther north, somewhere in the Yangzi area. Others think these varieties may have been separate even before domestication. Japonica rices have shorter grains that cook up rather sticky; Japanese rice, derived from Chinese japonicas, is typical. Indica rices have longer grains that cook drier, like most Chinese and Indian rices. Some rices, also, already had the now-common genetic variant of the starch amylose that makes them cook up sticky. (This is mistakenly called glutinous in some sources; “glutinous,” in reference to grain, should be confined to grain that has actual gluten in it. Wheat has it; rice does not.)
At Jiahu in the Huai Valley, almost in the exact center of today’s China, rice was grown abundantly by 7000–6000 BCE (Zhang Chi and Hung 2013; the village was occupied until 5800). Since this village is apparently not in the natural range of rice, the plant must have been cultivated—unless it did range there in those warmer, wetter times. Jiahu rice still looks rather wild botanically (Cohen 2011) but has some morphological indications of domestication (Zhang Chi and Hung 2013). The inhabitants ate little or no millet (as shown by lack of C4 indications in their bones). Game and fish, plus wild foods including acorns, water caltrops (Trapa, mistakenly reported as “water chestnuts” in most English-language literature), and wild soybeans, and domestic dogs and pigs filled out the food supply. There are many similar sites in the area.
From early Neolithic times, the Chinese were known to drink fermented beverage made of rice, honey, and grape and hawthorn fruit, as evidenced by unmistakable lees on pots from 7000–6600 BCE at Jiahu. Patrick McGovern, dean of oeno-archaeologists, has examined and analyzed these (Khamsi 2004; McGovern 2009 and pers. comm.; Zhang Juzhong and Lee 2005). This is as early as any cultivated rice in the world, if the rice was cultivated (it may well not have been). It seems that the Chinese started brewing as soon as they had domesticated grain. The drink itself has been reconstructed by McGovern in collaboration with Dogfish Head Brewery, which sells it under the name of Chateau Jiahu. It is possibly not the finest taste experience in the beer world, and thus is not widely sold, but it is at least sometimes available after almost 9,000 years (McGovern 2009 and pers. comm., plus my personal experience with a goodly amount of it).
The people of Jiahu made flutes of crane bones; many have been recovered, some still playable (Liu and Chen 2012; Zhang Juzhong and Lee 2005). Cranes are sacred in much of East Asia to this day, and one can assume the flutes were used in shamanistic or other religious rites. These flutes are the earliest known multinote musical instruments, and indicate a complex, sensitive use of biotic resources, as well as probable reverence for cranes, much venerated in historic times.
Dorian Fuller and collaborators (2009) looked at rice grains to see if they came from easily shattering heads as opposed to nonshattering ones. People domesticating a grain will naturally select for nonshattering heads; the shattering ones fall apart and the grain is lost, so nonshattering heads are a sign of domestication. In most of the Yangzi area, there was a slow transition from shattering to nonshattering, between about 7000 and 5000 BCE. Domesticated rice was common, widespread, and varied by 5000, or at least not long after that, though some areas lagged behind (e.g., Tianluoshan, Zheng, et al. 2010). Recent finds indicate early paddy fields by 4000 (Zheng et al. 2010).
Rice needs a good deal of phosphorus. This nutrient is often trapped in tight chemical bonds in the warm and wet areas of the world and is thus unavailable to plants. Some rice varieties get around this problem by growing more roots with more phosphorus-absorptive capacity. A gene for such roots has been discovered by Rico Gamuyao and associates (2012) in an Indian rice variety, Kasalath. This gene could almost literally save the world. Phosphate fertilizers are getting expensive as phosphate rock mines are depleted. The world’s rice baskets—notably south and central China, Southeast Asia, much of India, and the American South—have the least available phosphorus (Kochian 2012), and this rice gene, bred into commercial rices, could help feed countless people.
Rice agriculture spread southward beginning around 6000–4000 BCE, and a complex mosaic of farmers and foragers emerged in the center and south—to remain there for thousands of years (T. Lu 2011). The south remained rather thinly populated well into Han Dynasty times, and the coastal people were already specialized fishers, seafarers, and traders (Jiao 2013)—a lifestyle reminiscent of southern China’s boat people in historic times. Farming was widespread, but clearly “population pressure” and the spread of intensive agriculture were not driving development; trade and seafaring were (Jiao 2013:609–10). Today, there are still foragers not far away, in northern Thailand and in Luzon; the foraging adjustment is often the best way to make use of mountain forests, where agriculture often remains impractical. So a mosaic of practices is expectable. The far southeast may not have had agriculture until 3000–2000, when it spread via interior and coastal routes (Chi and Hung 2012: 12); the usual mosaic continued.
Zhao Zhijun (2011) believes a third agricultural center might have existed in the south, based on root crops such as yams and taro. Domesticated rice made a sudden and dramatic appearance there a bit after 4000 BCE. Its rapid adoption implies that the region was agricultural already, and some rice root remains have turned up.
Similarities in styles of houses, pottery, burials, and other cultural matters prove that the northern and central centers, at least, formed one great network (Cohen 2011; we do not know about the root-growing south). New crops and products flowed freely around that ancient core of East Asian civilization. In The Food of China I postulated river-bottom land as the ideal place for early agriculture, but Liu et al. (2009) make a convincing case for domestication in low foothill and piedmont slope areas, where easily worked soil, good drainage, and safety from floods exist. I would bet on both.
The Later Neolithic
The emergent cultures like Peiligang were followed by such cultures as Yangshao, made famous in the 1920s for its exquisitely beautiful, large, colorful pottery vessels. They are very early, dating back to 5000 BCE. Yangshao, with settlements up to 25 ha by its middle phase, was centered on the middle Yellow River valley, but widely distributed, and closely related to similar cultures in the Wei Valley and elsewhere (Peterson and Shelach 2010, 2012). The Yangshao people lived largely on the two types of millet but had some rice—a good deal more of it than earlier northern cultures had. The Yangshao also had vegetables and fruits, many pigs and dogs, and a few other animals. (Yangshao is divided into an early phase, 5000–4000 BCE; a middle, 4000–3500; and a late, 3500–2800. See Zhang Zhongpei 2002.) This was followed by gray-to-black pottery generally designated as the Longshan Horizon, or Tradition, in central north China. It lasted until 1900 BCE, when more urban societies entered the picture.
The Yangshao site of Jiangzhai, near modern Xi’an, has been particularly well studied (Peterson and Shelach 2012; see photographs in Zhang Zhongpei 2002). In the early phase, a circle of houses surrounded a circular central plaza; the whole was protected by a ditch. The houses were divided into roughly five groups, each with several small houses around a larger one; this may indicate kinship groupings. Storage pits could have held enough millet to support hundreds of people. The site may have had around 400 people at any given time. Many households, however, seem to have had slender resources, possibly requiring support from others, or trading goods unseen in the record. Some of them at least probably specialized in pottery making; many well-made ceramics were found. A few copper objects turned up, some including zinc and thus “brass,” but this is surely accidental—there happened to be some zinc naturally occurring in the copper. Other sites have copper and even bronze, but again as an accident of copper and tin occurring together in the ore (Zhang Zhongpei 2002). Still, the occurrence of copper technology in Yangshao times is impressive.
A dragon figure and a tiger figure, picked out in mussel shells stuck to the floor of a tomb about 5,600 years old, were discovered in Henan in 1987 (Da 1988; K.-c. Chang 1999: 51; Morris 2010: 126; see excellent photographs in K.-c. Chang 2002b: 130, Zhang Zhongpei 2002: 78). The tomb, broadly Yangshao in culture, is probably that of a shaman or similar officiant. His skeleton is flanked by the animals, the dragon on his right, the tiger on his left. (To this day, the dragon, being yang, goes on the right; the tiger, more yin, on the left.) In the same tomb is a shell design of “an animal with a dragon’s head and a tiger’s body. A deer is seated on the tiger’s back, while on its head is a spider, and in front of it a ball … [and] a man riding on a dragon and a running tiger” (Zhang Zhongpei 2002: 77–78). The same tomb contained a Big Dipper design laid out in bones and other similar art. The dragon, tiger, and deer are still associated with soul travel (such numinous beings are called jue animals; Zhang Zhongpei 2002: 78). Shaman refers to an independent religious practitioner who engages in curing or helping rituals that involve sending his soul to the lands of gods and dead—or sometimes receives souls from there. The word comes from a Tungus language spoken on the borders of Manchuria and is actually first attested in documents from the Tungus-ruled Jin Dynasty in the 1100s CE. True shamans occur in traditional religion throughout East and Central Asia, and the term can be reasonably applied to similar traditional practitioners in indigenous societies of Siberia, native North America, and neighboring areas. The word is not correctly used as a general term for any religious practitioner in a traditional society. In this case, however, it seems highly likely that the man in ancient Henan was indeed a shaman.
Many complex farming cultures existed in China by 4000 BCE. Dates for first millet cultivation get progressively later as one leaves the interior loess lands in the Yellow River drainage. Similarly, dates for the first rice cultivation get progressively later as one leaves the Yangzi Valley. Reflecting this chronology, rice vocabularies from neighboring but only dubiously related languages show similarities all across East and Southeast Asia (Blench 2005). Japan got rice cultivation only by around 1000 (Kuzmin 2008a); large-scale, intensive cultivation spread, apparently from Korea, after 400.
Paddy agriculture in China is attested clearly by 2500 BCE (Crawford 2006) and must have been common before then. The rice of West Africa is a different species, independently domesticated about 2,000 years ago (Carney 2001). The “wild rice” of North America is neither wild nor rice; it is an aquatic grass (Zizania aquatica and/or Z. latifolia), cultivated also in China under the name lu sun, a name recently (and confusingly) used for asparagus.
Decades of failure to find Neolithic soybeans strengthened the case that the soybean came from the north in the Zhou Dynasty—as Chinese records say. Finally, however, Lee and associates (2008) have found earlier domesticated soybeans. A sequence of larger and larger soybeans—indicating deliberate breeding for size—emerged in 3000–2500 BCE in the Erlitou area of central China (where an early “Xia” city rose; see following chapter). Full domestication at around 1100–1000 occurred through north China and Korea (Crawford 2006; Lee 2007). Ping-ti Ho’s classic case for derivation from the Jung barbarians—Shanrong, in today’s usage—may still be fair enough (E. Anderson 1988). Rong, as now transcribed, was a general term for non-Chinese peoples north of the Chinese, and the northeast was the earliest center of diversity of soybeans, though centers of diversity elsewhere in China soon appeared (Lee et al. 2008). They were not called barbarians (fan or equivalent) in the early texts; calling them so was a later interpolation.
Archaeology has revealed a vast number of Neolithic cultures. Every part of China, as well as Korea (Nelson 1993), had a complex, sophisticated Neolithic tradition by 3000–2000 BCE. These peoples lived on grain, with many fruits, vegetables, fish, turtles, and domestic and wild animals. China was still game-rich, and deer were important. Even far-off New Guinea may have contributed: sugar cane may be a New Guinea domesticate, and it arrived in China very early. Bananas, a complex hybrid of two species (Musa acuminata × Musa balbisiana), come from somewhere in the Malaysia-Indonesia region, and recent studies suggest a date of 7000 years ago. They also came early to New Guinea (Rice 2005), where another species (Musa fehi) was also domesticated.
Vegetables and minor grain crops are not well attested early, but many were no doubt cultivated long ago (Crawford 2006). Buckwheat is first attested around 1500 BCE and was domesticated in west China, on or near the Tibetan cultural frontiers, possibly by 3000 (Ohnishi 1998).
A dramatic new find is a 4,000-year-old bowl of noodles, at Lajia in northwest China (H. Lu et al. 2005). The noodles were made from millet (both panic and foxtail) and were about 20 cm long; they were excellently preserved, in an overturned bowl that had become sealed by clay below and around it. They were probably extruded by being forced through holes in a plate and into boiling water—this being the traditional Chinese way of making noodles from low-gluten grains like millet. The history of noodles in the Western world is well known; they first occur around 200–400 CE. Perhaps they spread from China, but it seems much more likely they were independently invented. In any case, China has a clear and very long priority. However, noodles are not mentioned in Chinese writing till about 100 CE, in the Han Dynasty, by which time there had been other archaeological finds of them. Textual evidence for practical crafts is late and spotty in China.
The classic association of greater cultural complexity with a widening gap between rich and poor and between male and female is confirmed by recent studies of body size, as well as of grave goods in cemeteries. In particular, people tended to be somewhat less healthy as the Neolithic progressed; then, in the late Zhou Dynasty, males were notably taller and females smaller than in earlier times (Pechenkina and Ma 2008).
Magnificent photographs of most of the sites mentioned in this chapter are found in Allan 2002 and Yang Xiaoneng 1999.
Animals
Pigs soon became very important as a wealth item, with consumption of pork showing high status. Domesticated pigs are now reported by 7000 BCE (Lawler 2009), though this date is questioned. The possibility of their being domesticated in China, independently of the Near East, is still open (Larson et al. 2010).
By 6000 BCE, pigs were domesticated in China (and also, apparently independently, in West Asia) and being fed millet husks and waste (Jing and Flad 2002; Li Liu 2004). It is possible that they occurred even earlier; bones from 7000 may be those of domesticated swine (Cohen 2011). This is about as early as domestic pigs are also found in the Near East; they were independently domesticated in both places. This is not surprising. Pigs, like many animals, tame themselves if fed, and they are very good eating. People all over the world keep young wild pigs (and other wild game) today, especially if hunters kill a mother and young ones are left. The young are eaten when they grow big. This provides a good context for domestication. The most tranquil young may not be killed until they have bred, and thus tranquility and “domestic”-ness are selected. Tame pigs have had their brains reduced in size by a third, more than any other animal; they have been bred for docility, nonaggression, and sloth (Zeder 2012). They are still fairly intelligent as animals go, but nothing like a wild pig or peccary.
Early use and steady increase in importance of pigs is visible in the archaeological record. Significant pork-eating and the pattern of status consumption are clear by 3000 BCE (S.-O. Kim 1994). This set a pattern; the same is true today throughout China except in Muslim areas. However, it is much more evident in north China than in the Yangzi country. The latter had so much game and fish that these resources remained more important than domestic livestock until quite late, perhaps 2000 (Yuan et al. 2008). Fish were so important in the lower Yangzi area that people were buried with them. Perhaps this was food for the other world. Fish may have been sacred (as some still are in south China) or may have been totems or spirit companions. Domestic dogs have existed in China since around 8000 BCE (Liu and Chen 2012: 56)—at least as long as pigs and probably longer. In fact, the dog may be partly of Chinese origin—genetics is equivocal but does not rule out an East Asian input into the domestic dog. Chinese has two words for dog. An ordinary dog is gou. The other word is a classical stylish word, guan, “hound,” an obvious Indo-European borrowing (Mair 1998) cognate with the English word. Mair thinks gou too may be IE (from Tocharian), but it seems to be older and indigenous, and I think it derives from the proto-Tibeto-Burman (= proto-Sino-Tibetan) form, which was something like *kwe.
Dogs too suffered from the skull and tooth reduction that marks modern animals; compared to wolves, dogs have 30 percent less brain mass. The difference comes largely in the sensory, motor, and emotional areas of the brain; fierceness and extreme power have been bred out of them (Zeder 2012).
Meanwhile, sheep were domesticated around 8000 BCE in the Near East. Recent evidence suggests that domesticated sheep came from the Near East across Central Asia. It now seems highly unlikely that sheep were domesticated independently in China (contrary to earlier speculations, e.g., E. Anderson 1988). In China they may go back to 4000 (Liu 2004: 59), but probably only to 2500 (Jing and Campbell 2009). The sheep are of a species found all across Asia then and now (Jing and Campbell 2009), but domestic sheep appear to be directly descended from a Near Eastern subspecies; still, the question is not closed. They are found earlier in Central Asia than in China.
Goats, which are strictly Near Eastern in origin, did not appear in China till 2800 BCE (Liu 2004: 59). Cattle and other Near Eastern domesticates got to China even later (cattle by 2500; Jing and Campbell 2009). Magnificent longhorns like Texas longhorns are shown on bronze sculptures from the Dian culture in early medieval Yunnan (personal observation, Yunnan Provincial Museum). Other early animals include chickens, domesticated apparently in what is now southern China (B. West and Zhou 1988) by 4000 BCE or earlier (Liu 2004), almost certainly by Thai-speaking peoples (see above).
Water buffaloes, so essential to rice cultivation, were possibly domesticated as early as 5000 BCE (Olsen 1993) but probably not till much later, since early finds claimed to be domestic were actually wild (Liu 2004: 59). The buffaloes appear especially in the Hemudu area (lower Yangzi Valley), already a center of rice agriculture (as it still is). Water buffaloes were certainly domesticated by the dawn of empire in China—some 2000 years ago or earlier. They seem, however, to have been of an Indian variety, which, if true, means they were introduced already domesticated, from farther southwest (Liu and Chen 2012:109–10).
Horses came only later and will be discussed below. Wild animals exploited in the early Neolithic include “sika deer, water buffalo, water deer, hare, cat, raccoon dog, tiger, and bear” (Liu 2004: 59), among others. All these are still eaten or used for medicine.
Around 7000 years ago, the Western world experienced a dramatic “secondary products revolution” (Sherratt 1981). This was the development in the Near East (rapidly spreading to Europe) of dairying, wool production, hide processing, and use of other products of domestic animals over and above meat and furred skins. China never took to dairying, but it did do a great deal with hides, hair, and bones; the early cities had bone workshops that reached considerable size.
Meanwhile in Central Asia … Another Neolithic
Central Asia consists of a series of ecological zones stretching across the Eurasian continent. The tundra and taiga of the far north give way to forest-steppe and then to steppes, which in turn gradually merge into deserts in the mid latitudes. The climate is extreme continental, with intensely cold winters and unbearably hot summers. High mountains, usually in ranges oriented east-west, dominate the distant landscapes. A particularly high knot extends from Tibet north through the Pamirs and Tianshan to the Altai; many peaks rise well over 20,000 feet. At the west and east ends, in Kazakhstan and China respectively, the steppes grade into farming areas. The deserts contain many linear oases, some very large, along the rivers that drain the high mountains. These linear oases have been the seats of great civilizations for the last two to two and a half millennia.
Westerners tend to imagine a vast grassland stretching for thousands of miles. The truth is more complex. The vast grasslands are in the northern, northwestern, and northeastern borderlands of Central Asia proper and are broken by low mountain ranges and rivers. The vast empty spaces without mountains, lakes, or rivers occupy almost all of Kazakhstan—the true steppe nation—and a great deal of Mongolia, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan, as well as neighboring countries. These areas are much drier, ranging from extremely dry grassland to waterless desert. Outside Kazakhstan and northern Turkmenistan, however, they are broken at fairly frequent intervals by large river or lake valleys that drain the snow ranges to the south and east. These valleys permit intensive agriculture.
Thus, the true picture of Central Asia is a rather coarse-grained mosaic. In the north and in the many mountain valleys and slopes of the east and south, there is good grazing, and here the famous nomads raised stock (Khazanov 1984; Vainstein 1980). In the river valleys, which are concentrated in the south, large-scale intensive agriculture is practiced today. An interesting feature of this agriculture throughout history, but apparently not in prehistoric times, is the extreme importance of tree and vine cropping. Apricots, mulberries, grapes, melons, almonds (in the far south of the region—they cannot take cold), and other such crops have been staple foods, not just minor dessert items. This sort of cultivation has not fared well in recent decades (and no doubt at many times in the past), due to escalating wars and scorched-earth policies; trees do not regrow fast enough.
Civilization flourished here, especially after 500 BCE, reaching a climax in the centuries of the Silk Road. In between are vast deserts, almost worthless, providing major barriers to travel. The Takla Makan Desert of Chinese Central Asia is one of the world’s driest, with virtually no rain. Major travel routes followed the rivers whenever possible, thus keeping relatively close to the southern fringes of the region. There was, however, also a great deal of contact across the northern approaches, where grassland and forest-steppe permitted nomadic and forest-based livelihood. North of that, subarctic forest eventually became used for specialized reindeer herding.
Agriculture spread to the western steppe-margins very early. At the opposite end of the steppes from China, the Tripolye and Cucuteni cultures, in modern Ukraine and Romania, built enormous towns with extremely elaborate and beautiful ceramics, at the same time as the Ubaid culture was developing rapidly toward urbanism in the Near East: roughly 5500–3000 BCE (Anthony 2007; Kohl 2007). The huge Tripolye and Cucuteni sites are not ancestral to any modern culture; they apparently were eclipsed by Indo-Europeans. They grew “emmer, einkorn, bread wheat, barley, peas, vetch, lentils, sheep, goats, cattle, pigs, buckwheat, millet (P. miliaceum), and both wild-type and domestic grapes” (Kohl 2007: 44). The Yamnaya cultural horizon, occurring in the same general area, may have involved early Indo-Europeans (Anthony 2007). Cities and writing arose in Mesopotamia and Egypt around 3200 BCE, indirectly influencing the steppes through trade.
Meanwhile, the first indications of contact with China are visible: panic millet turned up in Europe by 4000 BCE and was common by 5500 in the Linearbandkeramik and other cultures (Bellwood 2005: 21). (The Linearbandkeramik, or LBK, archaeological culture was the first agricultural manifestation in most of central Europe; it spread very rapidly from the east around 5500 BCE.) Millet probably spread from China, though domestication in Central Asia is also possible. It was a crop in Central Asia by 2200 (Frachetti 2012; Frachetti et al. 2010). A glass bead from the Near East at 2900 shows early contact in the other direction (Anthony 2007: 354).
However, it seems likely that there were far earlier contacts between East and West. Pottery spread through Siberia to the West. The earliest European pottery looks very much like the much earlier Chinese ware. Later, the similarities in shape, color, size, and design between Tripolye, early Mesopotamian, and Yangshao pottery styles are so striking that they have long been noted (e.g., Andersson 1934, 1943). While denied by excessively cautious scholars who note slight differences in the designs, these similarities are so numerous, striking, and close that to ignore them is pedantic.
Statuettes associated with trees and fertility, and stylistically close to Near Eastern analogues, appear around 3000 BCE. They may be connected with the cult of sacred trees that endures in Central Asia in spite of Islamic puritanism; ten-foot-thick plane trees, elms that ooze healing sap, and other wonderful trees are frequent and widely distributed there (Gorshunova 2012). Sacred trees are important to Uralic and Altaic peoples and to some settled Iranic-speakers. The cult is clearly continuous with Chinese reverence for trees; the same ideas and behaviors are visible.
Agriculture flourishes in Ukraine and in river valleys and montane out-wash fans throughout inner Asia, but full steppe conditions are impossible for agriculture. They are, however, ideal for herding the hardier kinds of stock: sheep, goats, and horses. The riverine zones along the Tarim, Syr Darya, Amu Darya, and other rivers were once among the most agriculturally productive tracts of land on earth—grain, forage crops, fruit trees, vegetables, and other crops (including early cotton) flourished. In recent decades, however, pollution, salt buildup in the soil, monocropping (especially cotton), urban sprawl, and other features of extremely bad land management have ruined much of the land.
The existence of extremely rich zones near vast tracts of nomadic herding country was an invitation for trouble. The steppe nomads could raise huge mobile forces and descend on the cities and farms, especially when warm and moist climatic periods allowed the nomads to increase both human and animal populations. Then the nomad leaders settle in the cities, succumb to luxury, lose their martial ability, and the whole cycle starts over again—as pointed out by the great Arab social scientist Ibn Khaldun in the fourteenth century.
This sequence is complicated by the fact that steppe nomads were never independent of settled people (Barfield 1989; Khazanov 1984). They required grain to supplement the products of their herds. They produced felt and wool goods but depended on settled people for other fabrics. They needed more metal than they could produce themselves. Metal goods—especially gold—became major wealth and show items. (Stock-herders who could produce all their own food and everyday goods existed in Arabia and Africa, but could not do so in Central Asia, where at least some grain, clothing, metal, and the like had to be bought.)
At the margins of the steppes, farming people encroached during warmer, moister periods. Since these are also the periods when steppe populations were increasing, tensions naturally arose. The infamous “barbarians” that harassed the Roman Empire rode out during such a time: the favorable climatic period in the early centuries of the Common Era. So did Mongol hordes during the Medieval Warm Period a few centuries later. Cold periods, by contrast, were deadly. Late winter and early spring storms dropped deep snow or, worse, ice over the young grass, starving the herds just when they needed feed the most. The old myth that “droughts” forced the nomads out on raids is long dead; droughts kept the nomads at home, scrabbling hard to survive, with no strength to raid. It was good times that made them raiders.
The steppe world began to take shape around 4000 BCE with the coming of livestock to Central Asia. Sheep and goats slowly spread from their homes in the hospitable, pleasant Near East out onto the desolate, cold steppe and desert lands. The real dawn of steppe power, however, was the domestication of the horse. It apparently took place around 3500 BCE in what is now Ukraine and Kazakhstan. Horses are first known as tamed livestock from the Botai culture of the Ukraine area, around 3500–3000 (not 4000, as previously reported). Horses were apparently domesticated only once, though herds recruited mares from local wild populations all over Eurasia (Achilli et al. 2012). The first secure evidence comes from the Botai culture in Kazakhstan (Anthony 2007; Frachetti 2008, 2012; Levine et al. 2003). The Botai people depended almost exclusively on horses for animal protein—not just the meat (of which they ate an enormous amount) but also the milk, as shown by residues in pots. Milking horses implies domestication.
No one knows when riding started—claims of bit wear on ancient horse teeth have not held up—but presumably it entered the picture about this time. By 3000 BCE, mounted riders seem to have been ranging widely over the steppes, and by 2000 the war chariot was a major part of warfare as far afield as the Near East. Horses and war chariots reached China around 1500. The Indo-Europeans were among those who took advantage of the horse and of livestock nomadism in general to radiate in all directions and build up large populations. It is tempting to associate the Botai with them, but the Botai are farther east than the presumed IE center in Ukraine. Perhaps the Indo-Europeans were already in the east, or perhaps the Botai people were ancestral Uralic or Altaic groups.
Horses were in China by the middle Shang Dynasty, 1400–1500 (Harris 2010: 82; Lawler 2009), but, so far, are not reported earlier. China is not good horse country; there is little good grazing, and, in historic times, there was little room to grow fodder. Much of China’s lands are deficient in selenium, which horses need (May 2012). China always obtained its best horses from the steppes.
Local conditions—ecological and cultural—led to different emphases in different areas of China and Central Asia: sheep and goats dominated widely, and there were even cattle specialists in some relatively favorable areas, but the all-importance of the horse in Kazakhstan was slow to change (Frachetti 2012). The western, central, eastern, montane, and far eastern steppes all had different histories, political as well as ecological; nearness to great civilizations, isolation by mountain ranges, and ease of mobility all mattered.
When the steppe peoples entered Chinese history, their way of life was already ancient. It was, however, far more than nomadic herding. Central Asia, especially at the western and eastern ends, was a complex intermingling of steppe nomads, seminomadic groups with varying degrees of agriculture, settled riverine farmers using intensive irrigation, and dry-farmers taking advantage of every wet period to extend farming far out into dry lands—as pointed out by scholars such as Owen Lattimore (1940) long ago and many others since (e.g., Barfield 1989, 1993; Barthold 1968).
By 1500 BCE there were substantial farming settlements in the Zhunge’er (Junggar, Dzungarian) Basin, in what is now far northwest China. The people dry-farmed wheat, barley (naked barley was prominent), and foxtail millet. They had sophisticated pottery, similar to that from other parts of eastern Central Asia at the time (P. Jia et al. 2011) but quite different from the wares of China—at that time just entering the Shang Dynasty. No hints of their ethnic affiliation exist. The area is traditionally a haunt of “nomads,” but these people were not nomadic. The widespread occurrence of early intensive farming in Central Asia, now established, has changed some historical speculation.
Other high cultures with distinctive art and architecture have been discovered in Central Asia (see Lawler 2009 for a quick overview). They share many broad patterns with the better-known early cultures of the Yellow River plain but are still distinctive. Data on these societies are only beginning to appear, and the instability of the region makes excavation difficult at best.
The early Chinese and Roman historians shared a tendency to overstate the nomadism and the dependence on stock as a way of differentiating the “Huns” and “Xiongnu” and other “barbarians” from “civilized” folk. In fact, every major stable Central Asian state or conquering horde had to depend on agriculture for a great deal of its food, clothing, and wealth (cf. Honeychurch and Amartuvshin 2006). The Xiongnu, for instance, held vast areas that were very dry but that were and are farmed, as well as several major riverine oasis-strips.
The Central Asian cultures have produced many mummies, preserved by the dry, cold climate. They show that most of the people there were of West Asian (some perhaps even European) background. Current genetic theory holds that the East Asian peoples are derived largely from groups that moved up very slowly from Southeast Asia. So their late radiation into Central Asia led to a meeting of quite different stocks when they encountered Caucasians spreading through Central Asia from the west. Many of the Central Asian mummy-wrapping textiles are wool woven in patterns similar to European ones; some are strikingly similar to Scottish plaids (Barber 1999; J. Mallory and Mair 2000). The earliest mummies date to 1800–1500 BCE. These people certainly include the ancestors of the Tocharians. (The Tocharoi of Greek history were in northern Afghanistan, whereas the people discussed here, the Twghry, occupied what is now Xinjiang. Tocharoi is a very reasonable Greek spelling of Twghry, so the mistake may simply be a minor misplacement by the Greek writers. See Hansen 2012: 73.) At least three Tocharian languages were spoken in this area in early historic times. The better known ones are usually called Tocharian A and B, but the more useful names Kuchean and Agnean are coming into use (Hansen 2012: 74). They are Indo-European, close enough to eastern European languages that their word for “fish” was “lox”! (Phonetically laks, lakse, or laksi.) And a modern Uyghur bread resembles the bagel (C. Robinson 1998). The Uyghur, a Turkic people, absorbed the Tocharians in early medieval times. Also well represented are people related to known Iranic groups. Probably most of the people of the ancient Tarim Basin and neighboring areas were Indo-Iranian. Turkic and Mongol speakers probably were established at the northern fringes.
The food attested was largely wheat and barley, with sheep, goats, cattle, horses, Bactrian camels, donkeys, and probably yaks to provide variety of dairy and meat stock. Some of the mummies, including the spectacular Beauty of Xiaohe (1800–1500 BCE), were buried with wheat grains; she also has a basket and winnowing fan to use in the afterlife. She was blonde and probably blue-eyed and came with mummified lice. More significant is the fact that she was buried with very European-looking fabrics, including woven wool goods that look like modern Scottish or northern European woolens. A baby was buried at about the same time, with similarly European clothing and a sheep-nipple baby bottle and goat-horn drinking cup. By Han times, grapes, apricots, melons, and other fruit were established. Apricots and wild grapes are probably native to the area, and apples have their home not far off in the mountains of Kazakhstan.
Horses and chariots had not entered the picture yet in eastern Central Asia, although they were established by this time in the western steppes. The delay is strange. If, as seems virtually certain, the Indo-Europeans and specifically the Indo-Aryans were in at the birth of horse-and-chariot culture, why were these not found among the Caucasians of east-central Asia? The grave goods and appearance of the mummies seem almost impossible to explain if they were not Indo-Europeans. Possibly the horse riders all moved south and west, to where there was more booty, leaving the East to foot travelers.
Tibet may have been settled by 30,000 years ago, though evidence is shaky. In any case, people entering around 6,000 years ago indicate the coming of agriculture and presumably animal husbandry (Brantingham and Xing 2006), at least to the lower margins of Tibet; the highlands were only seasonally occupied at best until somewhat later. There and in Central Asia, once again, complex cultures flourished by 1500–2000 BCE or earlier.
Soviet archaeological practice, including some of the best Soviet work, came to China in the early Communist period, before Mao broke with the USSR (Zhang Liangren 2011 gives a very detailed, and favorable, analysis of this phase). Then, after a long hiatus, Russian archaeology in Central Asia is now so important and pervasive that Chinese archaeologists are once again following Russian work closely. American and European influences dominated before 1949 (with some unfortunate colonialism intruding; Zhang Liangren 2011) and again in the 1980s and 1990s, under much more cooperative circumstances. A great deal of ongoing work is now done by mixed-national teams.
