History of China/Chapter 2

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History of China

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Chapter 2: Prehistoric China — From Peking Man to the Neolithic Revolution

1. Introduction: China Before History

The history of human presence in the territory now known as China stretches back at least 1.7 million years, to the earliest known hominid fossils found at Yuanmou in Yunnan province. For the vast majority of this immense span of time, there were no written records, no cities, no states — only the slow accumulation of stone tools, hearth ash, animal bones, and, eventually, pottery shards, jade ornaments, and the foundations of permanent settlements. This is the domain of prehistory, and it is accessible to us only through the methods of archaeology, physical anthropology, paleobotany, and, increasingly, genetics.

Yet this prehistoric period is not merely a preamble to "real" history. It was during these millennia that the fundamental patterns of Chinese civilization were established: the domestication of millet and rice, which made possible the dense agricultural populations that would characterize Chinese society; the development of settled village life, which laid the foundations for urbanization and state formation; the emergence of social stratification, which would eventually crystallize into the hierarchical political structures of the Bronze Age; and the creation of a rich material culture — above all in jade and pottery — that expressed cosmological ideas and social distinctions with a sophistication that belies any notion of "primitive" simplicity.

This chapter traces the human story in China from the earliest Paleolithic evidence through the Neolithic revolution and up to the threshold of the Bronze Age, where archaeology and legend begin to converge in the disputed figure of the Xia dynasty.

2. Paleolithic China: The Earliest Humans

2.1 Homo Erectus in East Asia

The earliest known hominid remains in China were discovered at Yuanmou (元谋) in Yunnan province in 1965. Two upper incisor teeth, along with stone artifacts and evidence of fire use, were initially dated to approximately 1.7 million years ago, though more recent estimates have suggested a somewhat younger date, perhaps around 700,000 years before the present (BP). The Yuanmou find remains controversial, but if the earlier dating is correct, it represents one of the earliest instances of Homo erectus outside Africa.

Far better known is Peking Man (北京人, Beijing ren), the Homo erectus population whose remains were discovered at Zhoukoudian (周口店), about 50 kilometers southwest of Beijing, beginning in the 1920s. Excavations conducted between 1923 and 1937, led by the Swedish geologist Johan Gunnar Andersson, the Canadian anatomist Davidson Black, and the Chinese paleontologist Pei Wenzhong, yielded the remains of at least forty individuals, along with over 100,000 stone artifacts and abundant evidence of fire use, including thick ash layers, charred bones, and burned seeds. The Zhoukoudian fossils date to approximately 770,000–230,000 years BP, representing a long period of intermittent occupation.

The original Peking Man fossils, among the most important paleontological finds of the twentieth century, were tragically lost during the Japanese invasion of China in 1941, when they disappeared en route to the United States for safekeeping. Despite extensive searches, they have never been recovered. Fortunately, casts and detailed descriptions survive, and subsequent excavations at Zhoukoudian and other sites have provided additional material.

Peking Man was long portrayed as a "cave man" who hunted large animals and controlled fire. More recent analysis has complicated this picture. Some scholars have argued that the Zhoukoudian caves were not permanent dwellings but occasional shelters, and that the thick ash layers may represent natural fires rather than human-controlled hearths. The question of whether Homo erectus at Zhoukoudian had mastered fire remains actively debated.

Other important Homo erectus sites in China include Lantian (蓝田) in Shaanxi province, where a cranium dated to approximately 1.15 million years BP was discovered in 1964, and Hexian (和县) in Anhui province, where a partial cranium dated to approximately 400,000 years BP was found in 1980. Together with Zhoukoudian, these sites demonstrate that Homo erectus was widely distributed across eastern China during the Middle Pleistocene.

2.2 Archaic Homo Sapiens and the Upper Cave Man

The transition from Homo erectus to Homo sapiens in East Asia is poorly understood and hotly debated. The "multiregional evolution" hypothesis, long favored by Chinese paleoanthropologists, holds that modern humans in China descended from the local Homo erectus population through a process of gradual evolution with gene flow from other regions. The "out of Africa" hypothesis, supported by most geneticists and many Western paleoanthropologists, holds that anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens) evolved in Africa approximately 200,000 years ago and migrated to East Asia approximately 60,000–70,000 years ago, replacing the local archaic populations. Recent genetic evidence strongly favors the out-of-Africa model, though the possibility of limited interbreeding between incoming modern humans and local archaic populations (including Denisovans, whose DNA has been detected in modern East Asian populations) adds complexity to the picture.

The Upper Cave (山顶洞, Shanding dong) at Zhoukoudian, discovered in 1930, yielded the remains of at least eight anatomically modern humans dated to approximately 34,000–10,000 years BP. The Upper Cave people possessed a markedly more sophisticated material culture than Peking Man: their stone tools were more finely worked, they produced bone needles suggesting the manufacture of sewn clothing, and they were buried with shell and bone ornaments colored with red ochre, indicating ritual behavior and aesthetic sensibility. The Upper Cave remains represent the earliest well-documented population of fully modern humans in northern China.

The Late Paleolithic period (ca. 40,000–12,000 BP) saw the gradual spread of modern humans across all of China, from the northern steppe to the subtropical south. Microblade technology — the production of tiny, standardized stone blades that could be mounted in composite tools — appeared in northern China around 30,000 BP, likely reflecting cultural connections with Siberia and Central Asia. In southern China, where bamboo, wood, and other organic materials were more readily available, the stone tool record is less impressive, but this probably reflects the use of perishable materials that have not survived rather than a lower level of technological sophistication.

3. The Neolithic Revolution: Agriculture and Settlement

3.1 The Origins of Agriculture

The Neolithic revolution — the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture and settled village life — is one of the most consequential transformations in human history. In China, this transition occurred independently in at least two major regions: the Yellow River valley of northern China, where millet was the primary domesticate, and the Yangtze River valley of central-southern China, where rice was first cultivated. China is thus one of the world's primary centers of agricultural origin, alongside the Fertile Crescent (wheat and barley), Mesoamerica (maize), and the Andes (potatoes).

The earliest evidence for rice cultivation comes from sites in the middle and lower Yangtze valley dating to approximately 10,000–8,000 BCE. Shangshan (上山) in Zhejiang province, dated to approximately 10,000–8,000 BCE, has yielded rice remains embedded in pottery, though whether this represents fully domesticated rice or wild rice in the early stages of management is debated. Kuahuqiao (跨湖桥) and Hemudu (河姆渡), also in Zhejiang, provide evidence of increasingly sophisticated rice cultivation from approximately 7,000 BCE onward. The process of rice domestication was slow and incremental, involving the gradual selection of traits favorable to cultivation — non-shattering seed heads, larger grain size, synchronized ripening — over thousands of years.

In northern China, foxtail millet (Setaria italica) and broomcorn millet (Panicum miliaceum) were domesticated independently, probably beginning around 8,000–7,000 BCE. The site of Cishan (磁山) in Hebei province, dated to approximately 6,000–5,000 BCE, contained storage pits holding an estimated 50,000 kilograms of millet, demonstrating that large-scale grain storage — and, by implication, surplus production — was already well established by this date. The domestication of millet, like that of rice, was a gradual process driven by human selection of favorable traits from wild grass ancestors.

The simultaneous but independent domestication of rice in the south and millet in the north established a fundamental division in Chinese agricultural geography that persists to the present day. Northern China, with its continental climate, loess soils, and relatively low rainfall, became millet country (and later wheat country, after wheat was introduced from western Asia around 2,500 BCE). Southern China, with its warmer, wetter climate and abundant waterways, became rice country. This north-south agricultural divide had profound consequences for settlement patterns, population density, diet, social organization, and cultural identity.

3.2 Domestication of Animals

Alongside plant domestication, the Neolithic revolution in China involved the domestication of several important animal species. The pig was domesticated from wild boar independently in China (probably in the Yellow River valley) and in the Near East, with the earliest evidence in China dating to approximately 7,000–6,000 BCE. The dog, domesticated from wolves at an uncertain date and place, was present in Chinese Neolithic sites from the earliest periods. Chickens were domesticated from wild red jungle fowl, probably in southern China or Southeast Asia. Water buffalo, important for rice paddy agriculture, were domesticated in southern China or mainland Southeast Asia.

The horse, which would become enormously important in Chinese military and cultural history, was not domesticated in China. Horses were first domesticated on the Central Eurasian steppe, probably in modern Kazakhstan, around 3,500–3,000 BCE, and did not arrive in China until the late Shang or early Zhou period. The absence of indigenous horse domestication is one of several factors that distinguish the Chinese Neolithic from its Near Eastern counterpart and help explain the different trajectories of state formation in the two regions.

4. The Major Neolithic Cultures

4.1 Yangshao Culture (ca. 5000–3000 BCE)

The Yangshao culture, named after the site of Yangshao (仰韶) in Mianchi county, Henan province, where it was first identified by Johan Gunnar Andersson in 1921, is one of the best-known Neolithic cultures in China. Distributed primarily along the middle Yellow River and its tributaries in Henan, Shaanxi, Shanxi, and Gansu, Yangshao is characterized by its distinctive painted pottery — large storage jars, bowls, and basins decorated with bold geometric and occasionally figurative designs in black, red, and white pigments.

Yangshao settlements were typically small villages of semi-subterranean houses clustered around a central open space, surrounded by storage pits and kilns. The most extensively excavated Yangshao site is Banpo (半坡), near Xi'an in Shaanxi province, which was occupied from approximately 4,800 to 3,600 BCE. Banpo was a village of about 400–600 inhabitants, with a central communal area surrounded by approximately forty-five houses, a pottery-making area to the east, and a cemetery to the north. The villagers cultivated millet, kept pigs and dogs, hunted deer, and fished in the nearby rivers.

Yangshao society appears to have been relatively egalitarian, at least in its earlier phases. Burial goods are modest and show little variation in wealth, suggesting the absence of sharp social stratification. Some scholars have interpreted Yangshao as a matrilineal society, based on the spatial organization of houses and burials, though this interpretation is contested. Over time, increasing differentiation in burial goods and settlement size suggests a gradual trend toward social complexity.

4.2 Longshan Culture (ca. 3000–1900 BCE)

The Longshan culture, named after the site of Chengziya (城子崖) in Longshan (龙山) township, Shandong province, represents a major step forward in social complexity. Distributed across much of the Yellow River valley and extending into the Yangtze region, Longshan is characterized by its distinctive thin, black, burnished pottery, produced on a fast wheel — a significant technological advance over the hand-built and slow-wheel pottery of the Yangshao period.

Longshan settlements were larger and more complex than their Yangshao predecessors. Many were surrounded by rammed-earth walls — a construction technique that involved pounding moistened earth in wooden frames to produce dense, durable walls. The walled settlement of Taosi (陶寺) in Shanxi province, dating to approximately 2,300–1,900 BCE, covered an area of approximately 280 hectares and contained elite residential areas, craft workshops, astronomical observation facilities, and a large cemetery with strikingly differentiated burials. The richest tombs at Taosi contained hundreds of burial objects, including jade ornaments, painted pottery, lacquerware, wooden musical instruments, and pig mandibles; the poorest contained nothing at all. This dramatic inequality points to a society with well-established hierarchies of wealth and status — perhaps the beginnings of a state-level political organization.

Violence also increased markedly in the Longshan period. Some settlements show evidence of destruction and massacre — at Shimao (石峁) in northern Shaanxi, for example, human skulls were found embedded in the city wall, apparently as foundation offerings. Skeletal evidence from Longshan sites shows a higher incidence of traumatic injuries than in earlier periods. Whether this violence reflects warfare between competing polities, raiding, or internal social conflict is unclear, but it suggests that the Longshan period was a time of intense competition for resources and power.

4.3 Southern Neolithic Cultures: Hemudu, Liangzhu, and Others

While the Yangshao and Longshan cultures dominated the Yellow River valley, equally impressive Neolithic cultures developed in the Yangtze valley and southern China. The Hemudu (河姆渡) culture of the lower Yangtze, dated to approximately 5,000–4,500 BCE, is notable for its well-preserved evidence of rice cultivation, its distinctive wooden architecture (houses raised on stilts above the marshy ground), and its rich artistic tradition, including carved ivory and bone ornaments depicting birds and other animals.

The most spectacular of the southern Neolithic cultures is Liangzhu (良渚), centered on the area around modern Hangzhou in Zhejiang province and dating to approximately 3,300–2,300 BCE. Liangzhu society was characterized by an extraordinary jade culture: elite burials contained hundreds of finely carved jade objects, including the distinctive cong (琮, a tube within a rectangular block) and bi (璧, a flat disk with a central perforation), forms that would continue to hold ritual significance throughout Chinese history. The Liangzhu site complex, designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2019, includes a central palace area of approximately 30 hectares, surrounded by a rammed-earth wall and a sophisticated hydraulic system of dams and canals extending over 100 square kilometers — one of the largest and most complex water management systems of the ancient world.

The Liangzhu civilization collapsed around 2,300 BCE, possibly due to environmental factors — a major flooding event has been detected in the geological record at approximately this date. Its jade tradition, however, survived and influenced subsequent cultures across China, including the Shang.

4.4 Hongshan Culture (ca. 4700–2900 BCE)

In northeastern China, the Hongshan (红山) culture of western Liaoning and southeastern Inner Mongolia developed yet another distinctive Neolithic tradition. Hongshan is best known for its jade carvings, particularly the so-called "pig-dragon" (猪龙, zhulong) — a C-shaped pendant depicting a creature that may be a stylized pig, dragon, or bear. The Hongshan site of Niuheliang (牛河梁) contained a remarkable complex of ritual structures, including a "goddess temple" (女神庙) containing life-sized clay statues of female figures, stone cairns, and jade-rich burials arranged in elaborate mortuary precincts.

Hongshan society appears to have been organized around elaborate ritual practices rather than the economic or military power that characterized the Longshan polities to the south. The investment in monumental ritual architecture at Niuheliang — and the apparent absence of large, permanently inhabited settlements — has led some scholars to characterize Hongshan as a "theocratic" society in which religious authority was the primary basis of social differentiation.

5. Social Stratification and Proto-Urbanization

The Neolithic period in China witnessed a profound transformation in social organization. Early Neolithic settlements like Banpo appear to have been relatively egalitarian communities of a few hundred people, with little evidence of inherited wealth or status differentiation. By the late Neolithic (Longshan period), settlements had grown to thousands of inhabitants, some enclosed by massive rammed-earth walls, with clear evidence of social stratification in burial practices, residential architecture, and access to prestige goods.

This process of increasing social complexity was driven by multiple factors. Agricultural intensification — the development of more productive farming techniques, including irrigation and the use of the plow — allowed larger populations to be supported on a given area of land and generated surpluses that could be controlled by emerging elites. Craft specialization — the production of fine pottery, jade objects, lacquerware, and other prestige goods by skilled artisans — created new forms of wealth and new mechanisms of social differentiation. Inter-community conflict — whether for land, water, trade routes, or other resources — favored the emergence of military leaders who could organize collective defense and offense.

The archaeological record shows that by the late Longshan period (ca. 2,500–1,900 BCE), some communities had developed characteristics that approach the threshold of state formation: hierarchical social organization, centralized decision-making, specialized craft production, monumental architecture, and the control of long-distance exchange networks. The walled site of Shimao in northern Shaanxi, dated to approximately 2,300–1,800 BCE, is the largest known late Neolithic settlement in China, covering over 400 hectares and featuring massive stone walls, palatial buildings, jade workshops, and human sacrifice — suggesting a level of political organization comparable to early state societies elsewhere in the world.

6. Jade Culture and Its Significance

Jade (玉, yu) occupies a unique place in Chinese culture, one that has no real parallel in other civilizations. From the Neolithic period onward, jade was the most valued material in Chinese material culture — more precious than gold, silver, or bronze. Jade objects served as markers of social status, as ritual implements in communication with the spirit world, as symbols of moral perfection, and as talismans believed to possess protective and even immortality-conferring powers.

The Chinese term yu encompasses two mineralogically distinct materials: nephrite (a calcium magnesium silicate) and jadeite (a sodium aluminum silicate). Nephrite was the jade of ancient China, sourced primarily from riverbeds in the Kunlun Mountains of Xinjiang (particularly the Hotan region) and, for some Neolithic cultures, from local sources in Liaoning, Jiangsu, and other regions. Jadeite, which is harder and can be more brilliantly colored, was not widely used in China until the eighteenth century, when it began to be imported from Burma.

The earliest known jade objects in China date to approximately 6,000 BCE and come from the Xinglongwa (兴隆洼) culture in Inner Mongolia — simple earrings and pendants that already demonstrate the value placed on this material. By the time of the Hongshan and Liangzhu cultures (roughly 4,700–2,300 BCE), jade working had reached a level of sophistication that is difficult to comprehend given the available technology: jade is extremely hard (6.0–6.5 on the Mohs scale for nephrite, 6.5–7.0 for jadeite) and cannot be carved with metal tools. Neolithic jade workers shaped their material through laborious grinding and drilling with abrasive sand, using bamboo, bone, or stone tools as intermediaries. The production of a single large cong or bi must have required hundreds of hours of skilled labor.

The symbolic meanings of Neolithic jade objects are difficult to reconstruct in the absence of written texts, but some patterns are clear. The bi disk — a flat, round object with a central perforation — is found in burials from the Liangzhu culture onward and was later associated with Heaven (the round shape symbolizing the sky). The cong tube — a rectangular block with a cylindrical interior bore — was associated with Earth. Together, bi and cong represented the fundamental cosmic duality that would become central to Chinese cosmological thought. The Liangzhu cong tubes are often decorated with a mysterious face motif — two large circular eyes above a mouth or bar — that may represent a deity, an ancestor, or a shamanic mask.

7. The Xia Dynasty Question

According to Chinese historical tradition, the Xia (夏) was the first dynasty, founded by the sage-king Yu the Great (大禹, Da Yu) after he successfully controlled the great floods that had devastated the land. Yu's father, Gun (鲧), had been tasked with flood control before him but had failed; Yu succeeded by dredging channels to direct the waters to the sea rather than building dams to contain them. For this achievement, the sage-emperor Shun (舜) ceded the throne to Yu, establishing the Xia dynasty, which according to traditional chronology ruled from approximately 2070 to 1600 BCE.

The Xia is described in the Shiji (Records of the Grand Historian) and other ancient texts as a hereditary monarchy whose kings included both virtuous rulers and tyrants. The last Xia king, Jie (桀), is portrayed as a cruel and dissolute despot whose oppression drove the people to revolt, leading to the overthrow of the Xia by Tang of Shang — a narrative that establishes the moral logic of dynastic succession that would structure Chinese historiography for the next three millennia.

The historical existence of the Xia dynasty has been debated for over a century. Skeptics point out that no contemporary written records of the Xia have been found (the earliest texts describing the Xia were composed centuries after its supposed fall), that the Xia narratives in transmitted texts bear the hallmarks of later fabrication (including detailed speeches and dialogue that no contemporary record could have preserved), and that the concept of a founding dynasty may have been created by the Zhou to legitimate their own seizure of power from the Shang. The influential "Doubting Antiquity" (疑古, yigu) school, led by Gu Jiegang (1893–1980) in the 1920s, argued that the sage-kings of Chinese legend — including Yao, Shun, and Yu — were mythological figures rather than historical persons, and that Chinese history could be reliably documented only from the Shang dynasty onward.

Defenders of the Xia's historicity point to the archaeological site of Erlitou (二里头) in Yanshi, Henan province, as potential evidence. Erlitou, dated to approximately 1,900–1,500 BCE, was a large and complex urban center covering approximately 300 hectares. It contained palatial buildings with rammed-earth foundations, bronze foundries producing the earliest known Chinese bronze ritual vessels, jade workshops, and elite burials with rich grave goods. Erlitou's dates, location, and cultural characteristics are broadly consistent with what the textual tradition says about the Xia, and many Chinese archaeologists identify Erlitou as a Xia capital.

However, the identification of Erlitou with the Xia remains unproven. No inscriptions have been found at Erlitou, so the site cannot be linked to any named polity or dynasty. The site could equally well represent an early phase of the Shang, a pre-Shang polity unrelated to the Xia, or a complex society that does not correspond to any entity described in transmitted texts. The question of whether the Xia existed as a historical dynasty — as opposed to a legendary tradition that may preserve distorted memories of real events and institutions — remains one of the most contentious issues in Chinese archaeology.

8. Erlitou and the Threshold of History

Whether or not Erlitou was the capital of the Xia, its significance is beyond dispute. The site represents the earliest known urban center in China, the earliest known center of bronze metallurgy, and the earliest known complex society that can plausibly be called a state. Its discovery in 1959 by the archaeologist Xu Xusheng (徐旭生), who was specifically searching for traces of the Xia, opened a new chapter in the study of early Chinese civilization.

Erlitou's urban layout reveals a planned, hierarchically organized settlement. At the center stood a palatial compound — Palace No. 1, covering approximately 10,000 square meters — with rammed-earth walls, wooden pillars, and a courtyard that may have served as an audience hall or ritual space. Nearby were bronze foundries where artisans produced the earliest Chinese bronze ritual vessels using the piece-mold casting technique that would become distinctive of Chinese bronze technology. This technique — in which a clay model was used to create segmented outer molds, which were then assembled around a core and filled with molten bronze — differs fundamentally from the lost-wax method used in Western Asia and produced a distinctive aesthetic of angular forms and surface decoration.

The bronze artifacts from Erlitou include the earliest known Chinese bronze jue (爵, a tripod wine vessel) and ding (鼎, a tripod food vessel) — forms that would remain central to Chinese ritual practice for over a millennium. The production of these vessels required sophisticated metallurgical knowledge, including the ability to alloy copper with tin and lead in precise proportions, and a complex division of labor involving miners, smelters, mold-makers, and casters. The concentration of bronze production at Erlitou suggests that access to bronze was controlled by an elite group that used bronze vessels as symbols of political authority and ritual power.

Erlitou's influence extended far beyond its immediate vicinity. Archaeological surveys have identified a network of sites sharing Erlitou-style material culture across a wide area of the central Yellow River valley, suggesting that Erlitou was the center of a regional polity with the ability to project its influence over a significant territory. The distribution of Erlitou-style artifacts — particularly distinctive bronze plaques inlaid with turquoise — has been traced as far as the Yangtze valley, indicating the existence of long-distance exchange networks.

The transition from Erlitou to the Erligang phase (ca. 1,600–1,400 BCE), which is generally associated with the early Shang dynasty, involved a dramatic expansion in the scale of urban settlement, bronze production, and political organization. The Erligang site near modern Zhengzhou covers an area of approximately 25 square kilometers — nearly a hundred times the size of Erlitou's core area — and its rammed-earth city wall, approximately 7 kilometers in circumference and up to 36 meters wide at the base, required an estimated 870,000 cubic meters of earth to construct.

Whether this transition represents a new dynasty (Shang replacing Xia) or an internal evolution within a single political tradition remains unclear. What is clear is that by approximately 1,600 BCE, the societies of the Yellow River valley had crossed the threshold from complex chiefdoms to state-level polities — entities with centralized political authority, specialized administrative and military institutions, large-scale urban settlements, and the technological capacity to mobilize massive labor for construction, production, and warfare. The age of prehistory was giving way to the age of history.