The landscape around Guilin was quite striking and beautiful. Out of the fertile plains rose huge, wooded, karst outcrops. Some were cone-shaped, others more rounded. Guilin City itself was spread out on the flat ground among the karst hills, and along the Li Jiang (Willow River). I was visiting soon after Qingming (pronounced ‘chingming’), the annual Chinese Festival of the Dead, when tombs are swept clean, inscriptions touched up and new pine trees planted in cemeteries. Qingming literally means ‘clear and bright’. I drove past graveyards with cairn-like tombs adorned with bright strips of red paper – prayers for protection – and in one village a funeral procession was making its way down the road, with a banging of cymbals and drums. The coffin was brightly decorated, topped off with a giant purple moth.
But I was visiting a much older graveyard: the cave site of Zengpiyan in Guilin, where I met the deputy director of the museum, Mr Wei Jun. He opened the iron gate protecting the cave and we stepped inside.
Archaeologists had dug down through river sediments and the trenches were still open. Eighteen burials had been discovered in the cave, mostly in flexed positions, and some covered in red ochre. As well as the human burials, Wei and his colleagues had found pebble tools and animal bones.
‘But the most important discovery was the pottery we found here in 2001,’ said Wei.
‘It happened on the morning of 7 July. I recall it was raining very hard outside. There were about seven or eight archaeologists working inside the cave. Then, suddenly, one of my colleagues came upon a piece of pottery that was a different colour – much paler – than other pottery we’d found.
‘Professor Fu came over and looked at it carefully, and thought it might be very old.’
From the depth at which it was found the archaeologists immediately suspected the pot of being ancient; when it was dated, from fragments of charcoal in the same layer, it turned out to be 12,000 years old.
‘From the radiocarbon dating, we know that these pieces of pottery are the oldest in China.’
These pieces of pottery were also among the oldest in the world. There was no evidence of plant or animal domestication at Guilin: the pots appeared to have been made by hunter-gatherers.5
The following day, I met Professor Fu Xianguo, who had directed the excavations at the cave. The earliest Zengpiyan pots were made with local clay, apparently deliberately tempered with quartz particles, and fired low, at less than 250 degrees C. They were thick, wide-mouthed and almost hemispherical in shape. On a sunny day, in a field near Guilin, 12,000 years after pottery was first made there, we recreated a pre-Neolithic pot. Fu’s chief pottery technician, Mr Wang Hao Tian, collected reddish clay, and we mixed it with smashed-up quartz particles. Wang dug a round pit and we pushed pieces of clay into it, to form the hemispherical shape. Then we fired the pot, along with other pots that Wang had been busy making that week, on an open fire. Two brothers, Mr Liu Cheng Jie and Mr Liu Cheng Yi, traditional potters from nearby Jing Xi (pronounced ‘Jing see’) on the Vietnamese border, came to help with the firing. The Liu brothers laid logs across large stones to form a rack on which to place the pots, then pushed burning sheaves of straw under the rack, moving the flaming bundle around with a long stick to sear the pots. After about an hour of this gentle firing, the Lius built up a bonfire over the rack, with piles of straw and branches, and our pots were hidden inside the blaze. Another hour later and the potters started to dismantle the still-smoking fire, hooking the pots out on long sticks and setting them down on the ground, where they made a quiet tinkling noise as they cooled. Most of the pots had survived the firing – including our experimental pre-Neolithic cauldron, now dark grey but still speckled with quartz.
Fu had his own particular theory about why the foragers around Guilin had started to make pottery.
‘In north China, the origin of pottery is thought to be very much related to the development of agriculture,’ explained Fu. ‘But from our study, we think the origin of the pottery in south China is related to boiling snails.’
I was more than a little sceptical about this idea. Certainly, there were plenty of snail shells in Zengpiyan Cave, but there was no real evidence that they had been deposited there by humans, rather than washed in with the river sediments, or even that they had been cooked.
But it was time to subject our pot to a test. Most of the early pots were round-bottomed cooking cauldrons, like the hemispherical pot we had made, and seemed well designed for boiling water. After our pot had cooled, we subjected it to another test: filling it with water and bringing it to the boil over an open fire. It didn’t break. In fact, there’s no evidence that the Guilin pots had been heated again after their initial firing, although our experiment had at least demonstrated that they could survive being heated.
It may be possible to find out what the pre-Neolithic potters of Guilin were putting in their pots, using residue analysis – which can be applied to fragments. Until then, any theories about what the pots were used for, including snail-cooking, must remain speculative. Some archaeologists have argued that the early pre-Neolithic pots were used to cook wild grains, and although there is no direct evidence for this either the pots are from a time when wild grasses start to form a more important part of diets.6
During the LGM, East Asia became colder and drier: deciduous trees retreated south of the Yangtze River and vast areas of what is now China became grassland. After the Ice Age, the global climate became warmer and wetter, and there was more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which may have resulted in grasses becoming up to 50 per cent more productive. It is around this time that the archaeological record shows people in China, as well as in south-west Asia and Europe, beginning to focus on collecting wild grasses.7 But then, around 11,000 years ago, there was a cold, dry spell, comparable to the Younger Dryas in Europe. Perhaps it was this deterioration in climate that provoked the foragers to start cultivating grasses – whose seeds could be stored through the winter.7, 8
Although China is now dominated by rice agriculture, millet was just as important to the early cereal growers. Genetic studies of modern cultivated and wild grasses have suggested that domesticated rice (Oryza sativa) may derive from the Asian wild rices O. rufipogon and O. nivara. There are two subspecies of domestic rice which may relate to two, separate centres of origin of rice farming: in East Asia and in South Asia. Foxtail millet (Setaria italica) may come from the wild green foxtail (S. viridis), while broomcorn millet may come from a wild grass of the same name: Panicum miliaceum. Generation upon generation, selection of more seedy plants made the domesticated varieties more productive than their wild counterparts. I had never really thought of rice as ‘grass’. Then I visited the terraced paddy fields of Long Ji and saw Liao Jongpu, whose family had farmed there for generations, with a handful of grass-like seedlings, picking out sprigs of three or four stems at a time, to sow into his submerged fields. It looked like grass, but it was going to be food.
As the climate warmed back up again after 10,000 years, cereal cultivation intensified – and was there to stay. Today, rice in south China has a higher genetic diversity than that in the north, suggesting that the origins of domestication lay in the south. But the rice of the Yangtzi Basin, while less genetically diverse, looks more ancient and closer to its wild counterpart.8 Climatic changes and human manipulation of the environment make it really difficult to predict the origins of plant strains from their modern-day distributions.7
The earliest archaeological evidence of agriculture in China comes from the area around the Yangtzi River Valley. Grinding slabs and wild rice husks have been found in Upper Palaeolithic cave and rockshelter sites, dating to beyond 10,000 years ago, showing that people were collecting and processing wild grasses. It’s important to remember that the grass seeds were just part of a much wider diet: wild rice and millet were not productive enough to have been a staple food, and would have been just one part of a broad-based subsistence strategy. And, in fact, although we tend to focus on rice because of its
importance today, the earliest domesticated plants may not have been cereals: they could have been starchy roots and tubers like yams and taro, or even non-food plants like gourds or jute. The first farmers are likely to have been cultivating a range of crops.7
In the 1970s, evidence for cultivation started to appear as Neolithic villages were discovered, dating to around 7000 years ago. Since then, the earliest dates for farming in the region have been pushed back to about 10,000 years ago, and even earlier. In 2001, archaeologists uncovered a Neolithic site in Shangshan, in Zhejiang Province. The site was the remains of an early village: post-holes and trenches marked the outlines of dwellings, while stone tools, large grinding stones, pebble pestles and red pottery provided clues about life in the village. Many of the stone tools were basic chipped pebbles and flakes, just as are found throughout the Palaeolithic in China, but some are something new and different entirely – stone axes and adzes – suggesting an increased reliance on cultivation. These people were working the land.9
The pottery at Shangshan is still similar to the earlier forms – simple, hand-formed or slab-built pots, fired at low temperatures – but it also contains important clues to the new way of life in Shangshan village. The clay was tempered with bits of plant – the first example of this – and some of those plant remains are rice husks, shorter and fatter than wild grains, suggesting these may be the remains of an early domesticated variety. Charcoal embedded in the pottery has been radiocarbon dated to around 10,000 years ago.
Earlier sites with pottery are caves, like Zengpiyan. But the Neolithic village of Shangshan is in the middle of a river basin. It represents the beginnings of a new, more sedentary lifestyle. Instead of moving around the landscape, setting up temporary camps or using natural ‘homes’ like rockshelters and caves, a place was chosen for its suitability for growing crops, and permanent houses were built.9
The transition to farming and a settled way of life was gradual and patchy. It is likely that the early cultivators were semi-nomadic ‘collectors’, using wild foods supplemented with cultivated varieties. Caring for crops would have increased productivity but would also have tied farmers to their fields, so this is perhaps why they stopped being nomads and settled down in villages like Shangshan. But it is also important not to imagine that hunting and gathering was completely abandoned as agriculturalism was taken up. Even in recent, historic times, farmers continued to collect wild plants and hunt wild animals.8
Some archaeologists have suggested that population pressure was a motivating factor in the origin of farming and a settled way of life. But settlement of large communities doesn’t happen until after 9000 years ago in China. Early settlements are small-scale and most of the artefacts found in them are the tools of daily use, rather than ‘luxury’ items like beautiful pots or jewellery. So prehistoric Chinese society between 13,000 and 9000 years ago seems quite egalitarian; the proposition that agriculture may have arisen there to support a stratified society and accumulation of wealth – or that early pottery was developed by aggrandising individuals as a sign of prestige – seems unfounded. Although I rather like the idea of ‘competitive feasting’, there’s no evidence that this drove the origins of agriculture or pottery. Climate seems to have been a major factor, but the precise environmental and social factors that led to the gradual adoption of agriculturalism and a settled way of life in the East are still unclear.8, 5
The transition to agriculture should not be viewed as inevitable or progressive, but once it originated it spread (although, in a few areas, including parts of Polynesia, New Zealand and Borneo, farmers faced with unsuitable environments reverted to foraging).1
So how did the spread of agriculturalism occur? Did the farmers’ population expand and replace the hunter-gatherers and their culture, or did the culture of agriculturalism spread among existing populations of foragers? Ammerman and Cavalli-Sforza proposed a ‘wave-of-advance’ model in Europe, where the farmers’ expansion can be seen as a spreading ripple of intermarriage and gene dilution, until the populations furthest from the cultural epicentre are genetically almost entirely derived from the original hunter-gatherers. Thus the population of western Ireland is 99 per cent genetically from the original foragers, with just 1 per cent of lineages traceable back to Anatolian farmers.1
Although we don’t yet understand the relationship between genetics and morphology, we can at least assume that people’s faces reflect their genetic make-up. So are East Asian features an indication that Neolithic farmers spread throughout eastern Asia, replacing earlier populations, or are those faces from more ancient lineages, before the advent of agriculturalism?
It would be nice to have a range of skulls that showed the emergence of East Asian features and allowed us to date the morphological changes, but skeletal evidence from the Far East is rare, especially before 11,000 years ago. The Niah skull, at around 40,000 years old, does not look ‘East Asian’, although it does bear similarities to the Ainu, the descendants of the original Jomon population in Japan. But there is a skull with recognisably East Asian features, from Java, dated to 7000 years ago, and thus pre-dating the beginning of rice cultivation in Indonesia.3
Some geneticists have argued that Y chromosome variants suggest that millet and rice farmers did indeed spread out from China, largely replacing earlier populations throughout East and South-East Asia,10 but Oppenheimer3 argues that the balance of the genetic evidence suggests a spread of people, with what we now recognise as East Asian features, much earlier than the Neolithic – around the LGM. He suggests that, at this time, people would have been retreating back towards the warmer coastline, populating the expanded coastal plains left by the drop in sea level. Oppenheimer suggests that, before the LGM, the inhabitants of East Asia looked like the original beachcombers. Then, during the LGM, ‘East Asian’-looking people from Central Asia moved outwards to the coasts of East Asia.
If Oppenheimer’s theory is right, it would seem that, as in Europe, most of the inhabitants of East Asia today are descended from the original beachcombers and the coastward-bound populations of the LGM, rather than from a wave of Neolithic farmers spreading through the region. Culture and language are much more labile, transportable commodities. Our genes betray a much more ancient heritage.
So, even in Shanghai, with all its skyscrapers and technology, the people may look very much like the hunter-gatherers who inhabited that coastal plain 20,000 years ago.
4. The Wild West:
The Colonisation of Europe
On the Way to Europe: Modern Humans in the Levant and Turkey
Considering that Europe is geographically so close to Africa, it seems remarkable that modern humans made it all the way to Australia some 20,000 years before we find any evidence of their presence in Europe. Why did it take so long? The answer is likely to be complex, involving geographical and environmental barriers, and, perhaps, the presence of other humans already occupying Europe. Because, whereas in most of Asia (with the notable exception of Flores) earlier humans had vanished long before moderns arrived on the scene, Europe was the domain of the Neanderthals.
There is a huge gap between the appearance of the first anatomically modern humans in the Near East – in the Skhul and Qafzeh caves in Israel, some 90,000–120,000 years ago – and the first evidence of modern humans in Europe – at around 45,000 years ago. After Skhul and Qafzeh, modern humans disappear from the Levant for around 50,000 years, although it seems that, during this time, modern humans were making their way eastwards along the coast of the Indian Ocean.
From Arabia and the Indian subcontinent, it may seem that the colonisers should have been able to spread north into Europe with ease. Stephen Oppenheimer1 suggests that, just as deserts may have blocked the northern route out of Africa for much of the last 100,000 years, the way from the Indian subcontinent and Arabian Peninsula to the Levant was also sealed off by geographical barriers: by the Zagros Mountains, and the Syrian and Arabian deserts. While the beachcombers surged eastwards,
their northwards expansion into Europe was blocked. But around 50,000 years ago, the climate warmed up briefly, for a few thousand years. Oppenheimer argues that this warming opened up a green corridor from the Arabian Gulf to Syria, a gate into Europe.
The colonisers could then have spread north-east, skirting the Zagros Mountains, up the coast of what is now Pakistan and Iran, and up the River Euphrates into modern-day Iraq and Syria, making their way from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean coast. Some archaeologists argue that Upper Palaeolithic sites along the Zagros Mountains support this route, and indeed suggest that Upper Palaeolithic technology may have originated around the Zagros Mountains, with some dates in excess of 40,000 years.2 However, these dates need to be treated with caution: firstly, these are dates at the very extreme of what is considered reliable for radiocarbon dating, and, secondly, the dates were reported in the 1960s, long before the new sampling and calibration techniques were applied. However, the types of tools found at the Zagros sites are similar to the earliest Upper Palaeolithic tools found around the eastern Mediterranean, known as the ‘Levantine Aurignacian’.
Routes into Europe. The black footprints represent the first modern humans to reach Europe, bringing with them the Aurignacian culture, starting around 45,000 years ago; the grey footprints represent the later incursion of the Gravettian people, beginning around 30,000 years ago.
The route from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean, following an earlier southern dispersal from Africa, seems a reasonable suggestion, but other researchers still favour a simple northern route out of Africa, from Egypt. But whichever of these routes was taken, we would expect to find part of the archaeological trail in the Levant and in Turkey; in other words, in those countries that border the eastern Mediterranean.
The Incredible Human Journey Page 25