Human History in North China

China’s history spans over 5,000 years, making it one of the oldest civilizations in the world. Yet there is considerable controversy regarding the dawn of agriculture and the trajectory of human evolution in the region.  Dr. Chris Morgan, working with an interdisciplinary, inter-institutional team of US researchers, scientists from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing, and professors and graduate students at Lanzhou University in Gansu Province, seeks to answer these questions by excavating and evaluating archaeological sites in northwest China.

In 2004 and 2006 the project focused on the transition to farming 8,000 years ago.  By excavating one of the earliest millet farming sites in North China, they found that the independent development of agriculture occurred much faster there than in other parts of the world, mainly because of the hunting focus of the site’s pre-farming occupants.  But farming in North China also may have had intensive foraging antecedents not unlike those found everywhere agriculture evolved independently save, until recently, North China, resolving a long-standing foraging to farming evolutionary incongruity.

In 2007, the team turned their attention to the Paleolithic era, between about 100,000 to 30,000 years ago, when modern humans may have first arrived in East Asia. Questions here are similar to those concerning Neanderthal-modern human relations in Europe: did modern humans evolve in place, migrate to and replace, or mix with their archaic human predecessors?  The team  found over 50 sites dating to this critical span of time; a recently submitted NSF grant seeks to fund additional work to tease out the tools, subsistence patterns, lifeways and perhaps the biological identity of site occupants.

Dr. Morgan realizes that working in China requires establishing guangxi, or amicable relationships, with key individuals.  When asked about difficulties experienced while working in China, Dr. Morgan states, “problems can be cultural, but that’s ultimately what we, as anthropologists, are there to study.” The roots of this culture and its people are what Dr. Morgan and his colleagues seek to find out and with luck, this study will unveil “some of the most critical aspects of human history.”

Dr. Christopher Morgan is an assistant professor in the department of sociology, social work, and anthropology at Utah State University.