Prehistory of Myanmar

Named after the central dry zone sites where most of the early settlement finds are located, the Anyathian period was when plants and animals were first domesticated and polished stone tools appeared in Burma.

[2] Evidence also shows rice growing settlements of large villages and small cities that traded with their surroundings and as far as China between 500 BCE and 200 CE.

[3] Bronze-decorated coffins and burial sites filled with the earthenware remains of feasting and drinking provide a glimpse of the lifestyle of their affluent society.

By the Pagan period, inscriptions show Thets, Kadus, Sgaws, Kanyans, Palaungs, Was and Shans also inhabited the Irrawaddy valley and its peripheral regions.

[7] Some of the earliest anthropoid primate fossils in the world, dating to about 40 million years ago,[8] were found in the Pondaung Formations in Pale Township, central Myanmar.

However, domestications and polishing of stones, which are possible signs of Neolithic culture, are not known until the discovery of Padah Lin caves in Southern Shan State.

[13] Three caves located near Taunggyi at the edge of the Shan Plateau, depict the Neolithic age when farming, domestication, and polished stone tools first appeared.

These paintings lie from ten to twelve feet above the floor level depicting figures in red ochre of two human hands, a fish, bulls, bisons, a deer and probably the hind of an elephant.

[15] This period spans from 1500 to 1000 BC during which knowledge of the smelting and casting of copper and tin seems to have spread rapidly along the Neolithic exchange routes.

[16] Another site is the area of Taungthaman, near Irrawaddy River within the walls of the 18th century capital, Amarapura, occupied from the late Neolithic through the early Iron Age, around the middle of the first millennium BCE.

[3] A notable characteristics of the people of this era is that they buried their dead together with decorative ceramics and common household objects such as bowls and spoons.

[1] The prehistory period came to a close c. 200 BCE when the Pyu people, the earliest inhabitants of Burma of whom records are extant, began to move into the upper Irrawaddy valley from north of present-day Yunnan.

[18] The Mon people of Haribhunjaya and Dvaravati kingdoms in modern Thailand may have entered present-day Lower Burma as early as the 6th century CE.

According to mainstream scholarship, the Mon had founded at least two small kingdoms (or large city-states) centred on Pegu (Bago) and Thaton by the mid 9th century.