Prehistory of China

The earliest human occupation of what is now China dates to the Lower Paleolithic c. 1.7 million years ago—attested by archaeological finds such as the Yuanmou Man.

[5] During the latter stages of the Paleolithic humans began to create the earliest art and became involved in religious and spiritual realms, such as funerals and rituals.

[8] The Middle Paleolithic culture in China can be represented by the Dingcun site found in Xiangfen, Shanxi Province.

[14] In addition, a number of Paleolithic cultural sites belonging to this period or slightly later have been found in Tibet, Xinjiang and Qinghai.

In general, the main characteristic of the cultures of this period is that, with the exception of a few sites, the production of blade crafts and bone and horn tools was not very well developed.

The presence of agricultural tools, grains, and domestic animals signifies that a significant portion of food was already supplied by production.

[17]: 20 Yangshao culture is the mainstream of Neolithic culture in the Yellow River basin, distributed throughout Henan, Shanxi, Shaanxi, Hebei, Liaodong, Ningxia, southern Inner Mongolia, Henan and Hubei's northwestern part, including the entire Central Plains and the Guanshan area.

Dwelling sites are usually square or round and semisubterranian, divided into inner and outer chambers, with flat or even chalky floors.

In some cases, sites in good condition can encompass several non-contiguous cultural layers, suggesting that agriculture was practiced in the form of nomadic cultivation.

But tribal migration often depended on conditions favorable to farming, so that the same site could be occupied successively by people moving in to establish a settled tribe.

The Banpo Tribe may have had hundreds of dwelling sites, with the domiciles and storage caves concentrated in the center of the settlement, surrounded by a deep ditch.

To the north of the Banpo site, there is a communal cemetery, where the remains of children and adults are buried, and the territory of the living and the dead is clearly separated.

Yangshao agriculture was productive to such a level that storage caves are found distributed all throughout the villages, clearly indicating surplus food supply.

Motifs include geometric shapes and flowing irregular lines, as well as fairly realistic or pictorial images, such as fish, pigs, frogs, sheep, human heads, and the like.

Several of these rudimentary engravings and paintings have symbolic functions, to the point that certain scholars consider Yangshao pottery patterns a form of writing.

On the whole, Yangshao culture in the social organization, production level and the use of abstract symbols have a considerable degree of development.

[24] The Longshan culture of Henan occupied the Jinnan and Ji'nan regions, mainly along the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River.

Religious beliefs emerged, and bone divination and special burial rites are sufficient to indicate the direction of this development.

Eggshell pottery, with its thin, hard walls, was not intended for everyday use, and this specialized utensil was developed for religious ceremonies as well.

[24] China entered the Bronze Age and went through several different stages of development: early, middle and late.

Some scholars have divided China's Bronze Age from the Shang and Zhou dynasties to the Warring States period into four phases: the heyday, the decadence, the mid-emergence, and the decline.

Academician Du Zhengsheng pointed out in Ancient Society and the State that from the Stone Age to the Bronze Age, there was no breakthrough in the development of the tools of production in China, but only class and social changes, and that bronzes were mainly used as ceremonial weapons and weapons of war as a symbol of political power.

The civilizational underpinnings of the Erlitou culture became the mainstay of Chinese civilization through the inheritance and abandonment between the dynasties of the Shang and Zhou eras.

[29] According to archaeological discoveries, the pre-Shang dynasty, centered on Erligang in Zhengzhou, the sites of the Yin–Shang period, such as Liulige in Huixian and Donggangou in Luoyang, belong to this era.

[30] Following a brief occupation at Huanbei,[31] the final part of the Shang dynasty centered on Xiaotun Village in Anyang, the upper levels of the Zhengzhou Park area, and the Taishan Temple site and burials in Luoyang.