Ancient skeleton covered in cannabis shroud unearthed in China

A team of archaeologists led by Hongen Jiang with the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences working in the Turpan Basin in a northwestern part of China has unearthed the skeleton of a man who died between 2,500 and 2,800 years ago and was covered with a cannabis shroud when he was buried. In their paper published in the journal Economic Botany, the team describes how they were continuing work on exploring an ancient cemetery looking for clues about early cannabis use and happened upon the unusual find.

Humans have a long history of using cannabis for a variety of purposes—as hemp, it has been used to make rope and clothes; its seeds have been consumed to gain nutrition from the oils they contain, but perhaps most notoriously, the plant has been burned or eaten to gain a feeling of euphoria. In this new find, it appears the plant may have been used as part of a burial ritual.

The skeleton has been identified as once belonging to a Caucasian man approximately 35 years old at the time of his death. Those that had buried him had placed a willow pillow under his head and had then placed a shroud of (13) cannabis plants over his chest reaching from below his pelvis at one end to the side of his face on the other. The skeleton lay in one of the 240 graves in the area known as the Jiayi cemetery. The people that lived in the area at the time were part of a Kingdom from 3,000 and 2,000 years ago known as the Subeixi. Prior research has shown the people lived there because it was an oasis in the desert, one that had become an important place for travelers to rest during their trek along the Silk Road.

The researchers note that other examples of cannabis use have been found in the other nearby graves, but not as shrouds—mainly they were simply seeds or just leaves tossed into a grave site before burial. They point out that their find is the first to have full cannabis plants and the first time it has ever been seen used as a shroud. They believe the inclusion of whole plants suggests that the plants were grown locally—also the ripeness of the heads suggested they had been harvested and buried in the latter part of the summer. And because the heads were covered in glandular trichomes, which contain THC, the active ingredient in such plants, they believe that it was normally used as a psychoactive drug.
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Reference:

Phys.org. 2017. “Ancient skeleton covered in cannabis shroud unearthed in China”. Phys.org. Posted: October 6, 2016. Available online: http://phys.org/news/2016-10-ancient-skeleton-cannabis-shroud-unearthed.html

Ancient Chinese pottery reveals 5,000-yr-old beer brew (Update)

Residue on pottery from an archeological site has revealed the earliest evidence of beer brewing in China left from a 5,000-year-old recipe, researchers said Monday.

The artifacts show that people of the era had already mastered an "advanced beer brewing technique" that contained elements from East and West, according to a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a peer-reviewed US journal.

Yellowish residue gleaned from pottery funnels and wide-mouthed pots show traces of ingredients that had been fermented together—broomcorn millet, barley, a chewy grain known as Job's tears, and tubers.

"The discovery of barley is a surprise," lead author Jiajing Wang of Stanford University told AFP, saying it is the earliest known sign of barley in archeological materials from China.

"This beer recipe indicates a mix of Chinese and Western traditions—barley from the West; millet, Job's tears and tubers from China."

The discovery indicates that barley made its way to China some 1,000 years earlier than previously believed.

Barley "may have been used as a beer-making ingredient long before it became an agricultural staple," the study said.

The archaeological site at Mijiaya, near a tributary of the Wei River in northern China, includes two pits dating to around 3,400-2,900 BC.

It contains artifacts that point to beer brewing, filtration and underground storage, as well as stoves that may have been used to heat and mash grains.

However, it is impossible to know exactly how the beer tasted, researchers said, because they do not know the ingredients' exact proportion.

"My guess is that the beer might have tasted a bit sour and a bit sweet," Wang said.

"Sour comes from fermented cereal grains, sweet from tubers."

Elite drink

Evidence of beer brewing has been found around the same time period in Iran and Egypt, experts say.

"The introduction of Middle Eastern barley into a Chinese drink fits with the special role of fermented beverages in social interactions and as an exotic ingredient which would appeal to emerging elite individuals," said Patrick McGovern, an expert on biomolecular archeology at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archeology and Anthropology.

McGovern, who was not involved in the study, agreed the techniques used for brewing in China were advanced, and that "ancient peoples, including those at Mijiaya, applied the same principles and techniques as brewers do today."

They knew to use heat to break down carbohydrates, and the underground location of the brew site "is very significant," he added.

"A cool spot is important in controlling heat, which if it gets too high can destroy the enzymes responsible for the carbohydrate to sugar conversion," he said.

Lower temperatures would also have been important for keeping the beverage cool in storage.

Modern beer-makers such as Dogfish Head Brewery have tried to recreate some drinks from the past, and McGovern suggested offerings for any who might like to experience a flavor similar to the 5,000-year-old brew concocted in northern China.

"I would look to a variation on several of the Dogfish ancient ales," he said. "Maybe overlapping between Ta Henket, which includes barley and some exotic herbs and fruits, and Chateau Jiahu, representing an earlier phase of ancient Chinese brewing."
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Reference:

Phys.org. 2016. “Ancient Chinese pottery reveals 5,000-yr-old beer brew (Update)”. Phys.org. Posted: May 23, 2016. Available online: http://phys.org/news/2016-05-ancient-chinese-pottery-reveals-yr-old.html

Prosthetic Leg with Hoofed Foot Discovered in Ancient Chinese Tomb

The 2,200-year-old remains of a man with a deformed knee attached to a prosthetic leg tipped with a horse hoof have been discovered in a tomb in an ancient cemetery near Turpan, China.

The tomb holds the man and a younger woman, who may or may not have known the male occupant, scientists say.  

"The excavators soon came to find that the left leg of the male occupant is deformed, with the patella, femur and tibia [fused] together and fixed at 80 [degrees]," archaeologists wrote in a paper published recently in the journal Chinese Archaeology.

The fused knee would have made it hard for the man to walk or ride horses without the prosthetic leg, the researchers found. The man couldn't straighten his left leg out so the prosthetic leg, when attached, allowed the left leg to touch the floor when walking. The horse hoof at the bottom of the prosthetic leg acted like a foot.

The prosthetic leg was "made of poplar wood; it has seven holes along the two sides with leather tapes for attaching it to the deformed leg," the archaeologists wrote. "The lower part of the prosthetic leg is rendered into a cylindrical shape, wrapped with a scrapped ox horn and tipped with a horsehoof, which is meant to augment its adhesion and abrasion."

"The severe wear of the top implies that it has been in use for a long time," they added.

Radiocarbon dating indicates that the tomb in Turpan (also spelled Turfan) dates back around 2,200 years. The only other known prosthetic leg in the world that dates to that time is part of a bronze leg found in Capua, Italy. That leg was destroyed in a bombing raid during World War II. Prosthetic toes, dating to earlier times, have been found in Egypt.

Who used it?

Two other studies, published in the journals Bridging Eurasia and Quaternary International, provide more details about the man who used the hoofed leg. Researchers estimate that the man was about 5 feet 7 inches (1.7 meters) tall, and between 50 and 65 years old when he died.

What caused the odd fusion of his left knee joint? "Different causes, like inflammation in or around the joint, rheumatism or trauma, might have resulted in this pathological change," archaeologists wrote in the journal Bridging Eurasia.

Researchers found evidence that the man was infected with tuberculosis at some point in his life. They think that inflammation from the infection may have resulted in a bony growth that allowed his knee to fuse together. "The smooth surface of the bones affected by the ankyloses [joint fusion] suggests the active inflammatory process stopped years before death," the researchers wrote in Bridging Eurasia.

The man appears to have been a person of modest means, as he was buried with nonluxurious items: ceramic cups and a jar, a wooden plate and wooden bows, the archaeologists found. Sometime after he died, his tomb was reopened, and the body of a 20-year-old woman was put in, disturbing the man's bones. What relationship the man and woman had (if any) is unknown. The tomb was one of 30 that archaeologists excavated in the cemetery. 

Gushi people

Based on the results of the radiocarbon dating, "the occupants of the cemetery might have belonged to the Gushi [also spelled Jushi] population," archaeologists wrote in the Chinese Archaeology article. Little is known about these people. Ancient Chinese texts suggest that the Gushi had a small state. "As recorded in the Xiyu zhuan (the Account of the Western Regions) of the Hanshu (Book of Han, by Ban Gu), during the middle of the Western Han, there lived in the Turfan Basin the Gushi population, who constitutes one of the 'Thirty-six States of the Western Regions' of the Qin and Han Dynasties," the archaeologists wrote.

The Gushi state was conquered by China's Han Dynasty during a military campaign in the first century B.C., according to ancient records. "Given that the study of the Gushi culture is yet at its nascent stage, the [cemetery] provides valuable new materials," the archaeologists wrote.

Excavations at the cemetery were conducted between 2007 and 2008 by scientists at the Academia Turfanica, a research institute. A paper reporting their findings was published in 2013, in Chinese, in the journal Kaogu. That paper was recently translated and published in the journal Chinese Archaeology.

The papers reporting the study of the man's skeleton were published in 2014 in the journal Bridging Eurasia and in 2013 in the journal Quaternary International.
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Reference:

Jarus, Owen. 2016. “Prosthetic Leg with Hoofed Foot Discovered in Ancient Chinese Tomb”. Live Science. Posted: January 11, 2016. Available online: http://www.livescience.com/53321-ancient-prosthetic-leg-with-hoofed-foot-discovered.html

Early proto-porcelain from China likely made from local materials

Early Chinese proto-porcelain was likely made from materials gathered locally, according to a study published November 4, 2015 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Yu Li from the Fudan University, Shanghai, China, and colleagues.

Researchers excavated the Piaoshan kiln site in June 2012 and found evidence that the sites contents may be the earliest known Chinese proto-porcelain, a type of early Chinese porcelain. Based on the decorated patterns on the impressed stoneware and proto-porcelain sherds, the site is estimated to date to the late Xia (2070-1600 BC), the first dynasty of China. The authors of this study conducted proton-induced X-ray emission analyses of 118 proto-porcelain and 35 impressed stoneware sherds (pottery fragments) from Piaoshan and five subsequent kiln sites in the vicinity.

"The chemical composition of proto-porcelain samples from Piaoshan kiln site is studied for the first time in history", said Yu Li. "The research clearly show the relationship of inheritance of early Chinese proto-porcelain, and fill the large gaps in knowledge regarding the origin of Chinese proto-porcelain."

The authors found that impressed stoneware and proto-porcelain samples from the six kiln sites had distinct chemical profiles. This may indicate that the raw materials at each site were procured locally. They also found what may be one of the earliest attempts at applying artificial calcium-based glaze by mixing woody plant ashes with increased calcia-potash ratios into the glaze formula, the ashes likely leftover from firewood used to heat the kilns.
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Reference:

EurekAlert. 2016. “Early proto-porcelain from China likely made from local materials”. EurekAlert. Posted: November 4, 2015. Available online: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-11/p-epf102915.php

The origin and spread of 'Emperor's rice'

Scientists solve the mystery of black rice

Black rice has a rich cultural history; called "Forbidden" or "Emperor's" rice, it was reserved for the Emperor in ancient China and used as a tribute food. In the time since, it remained popular in certain regions of China and recently has become prized worldwide for its high levels of antioxidants. Despite its long history, the origins of black rice have not been clear. Black rice cultivars are found in locations scattered throughout Asia. However, most cultivated rice (species Oryza sativa) produces white grains, and the wild relative Oryza rufipogon has red grains.

The color of rice grains is determined by which colored pigments they accumulate (or fail to accumulate, in the case of white rice). For instance, the pro-anthocyanidins that give wild rice grains their characteristic red color are not produced in white rice due to a mutation in a gene controlling pro-anthocyanidin biosynthesis. The color in black rice is known to be due to anthocyanin pigments, but how these came to be made in the grains was not known.

A paper to be published this week in The Plant Cell reveals the answer to the long-standing question of how black rice became black and, moreover, traces the history of the trait from its molecular origin to its spread into modern-day varieties of rice. Researchers from two institutions in Japan collaborated to meticulously examine the genetic basis for the black color in rice grains. They discovered that the trait arose due to a rearrangement in a gene called Kala4, which activates the production of anthocyanins. They concluded that this rearrangement must have originally occurred in the tropical japonica subspecies of rice and that the black rice trait was then transferred into other varieties (including those found today) by crossbreeding.

According the study's lead scientist, Dr. Takeshi Izawa, "The birth and spread of novel agronomical traits during crop domestication are complex events in plant evolution." This new work on black rice helps explain the history of domestication of rice by ancient humans, during which they selected for desirable traits including grain color.
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Reference:

Science Daily. 2016. “The origin and spread of 'Emperor's rice'”. Science Daily. Posted: September 26, 2015. Available online: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/09/150926191819.htm

First-ever evidence of drastic climate change of Northern China region 4,200 years ago

Using a relatively new scientific dating technique, a Baylor University geologist and a team of international researchers were able to document -- for the first time -- a drastic climate change 4,200 years ago in northern China that affected vegetation and led to mass migration from the area.

Steve Forman, Ph.D., professor of geology in the College of Arts & Sciences, and researchers -- using a dating technique called Optically Stimulated Luminescence -- uncovered the first evidence of a severe decrease in precipitation on the freshwater lake system in China's Hunshandake Sandy Lands. The impact of this extreme climate change led to desertification -- or drying of the region -- and the mass migration of northern China's Neolithic cultures.

Their research findings appeared in a recent issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"With our unique scientific capabilities, we are able to assert with confidence that a quick change in climate drastically changed precipitation in this area, although, further study needs to be conducted to understand why this change occurred," Forman said. Between 2001 and 2014, the researchers investigated sediment sections throughout the Hunshandake and were able to determine that a sudden and irreversible shift in the monsoon system led to the abrupt drying of the Hunshandake resulting in complications for the population.

"This disruption of the water flow significantly impacted human activities in the region and limited water availability. The consequences of a rapid climatic shift on the Hunshandake herding and agricultural cultures were likely catastrophic," Forman said.

He said these climatic changes and drying of the Hunshandake continue to adversely impact the current population today. The Hunshandake remains arid and even with massive rehabilitation efforts will unlikely regrow dense vegetation.

"This study has far-reaching implications for understanding how populations respond and adapt to drastic climate change," Forman said.

Forman is the director of the Geoluminescence Dating Research Lab in the department of geology.
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Reference:

Science Daily. 2015. “First-ever evidence of drastic climate change of Northern China region 4,200 years ago”. Science Daily. Posted: February 16, 2015. Available online: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/02/150216160005.htm

Journal Reference:

1. Xiaoping Yang, Louis A. Scuderi, Xulong Wang, Louis J. Scuderi, Deguo Zhang, Hongwei Li, Steven Forman, Qinghai Xu, Ruichang Wang, Weiwen Huang, Shixia Yang. Groundwater sapping as the cause of irreversible desertification of Hunshandake Sandy Lands, Inner Mongolia, northern China. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2015; 112 (3): 702 DOI:10.1073/pnas.1418090112

Middle Pleistocene Hominin Teeth from Longtan Cave, Hexian, China

Abstract

Excavations at the Longtan Cave, Hexian, Anhui Province of Eastern China, have yielded several hominin fossils including crania, mandibular fragments, and teeth currently dated to 412±25 ka. While previous studies have focused on the cranial remains, there are no detailed analyses of the dental evidence. In this study, we provide metric and morphological descriptions and comparisons of ten teeth recovered from Hexian, including microcomputed tomography analyses. Our results indicate that the Hexian teeth are metrically and morphologically primitive and overlap with H. ergaster and East Asian Early and mid-Middle Pleistocene hominins in their large dimensions and occlusal complexities. However, the Hexian teeth differ from H. ergaster in features such as conspicuous vertical grooves on the labial/buccal surfaces of the central incisor and the upper premolar, the crown outline shapes of upper and lower molars and the numbers, shapes, and divergences of the roots. Despite their close geological ages, the Hexian teeth are also more primitive than Zhoukoudian specimens, and resemble Sangiran Early Pleistocene teeth. In addition, no typical Neanderthal features have been identified in the Hexian sample. Our study highlights the metrical and morphological primitive status of the Hexian sample in comparison to contemporaneous or even earlier populations of Asia. Based on this finding, we suggest that the primitive-derived gradients of the Asian hominins cannot be satisfactorily fitted along a chronological sequence, suggesting complex evolutionary scenarios with the coexistence and/or survival of different lineages in Eurasia. Hexian could represent the persistence in time of a H. erectus group that would have retained primitive features that were lost in other Asian populations such as Zhoukoudian or Panxian Dadong. Our study expands the metrical and morphological variations known for the East Asian hominins before the mid-Middle Pleistocene and warns about the possibility that the Asian hominin variability may have been taxonomically oversimplified.

Read the rest of the article.
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Reference:

Xing, Song, María Martinón-Torres, José María Bermúdez de Castro, Yingqi Zhang, Xiaoxiao Fan, Longting Zheng, Wanbo Huang, Wu Liu. 2015. “Middle Pleistocene Hominin Teeth from Longtan Cave, Hexian, China”. PLoS ONE. Posted: December 31, 2014. Available online: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0114265

China: 30 tombs, 28 chariots and 98 horse skeletons dating back 2,800 years found in Hubei

Also discovered are some of the earliest music instruments ever found in China

Archaeologists from Peking University have discovered a group of 30 tombs, 28 chariots and 49 pairs of horse skeletons dating back 2,800 years in Zaoyang city, Hubei Province in China.

The tombs are believed to belong to high-ranking Chinese nobility and date back to the Spring and Autumn Period in Chinese history (770-476BC).

All the tombs have been found on the same piece of land, with a separate "mass grave" of at least 28 wooden chariots buried together on their sides in a pit that measures 33m long by 4m wide.

"This chariot and horse pit is different from those discovered previously along the Yangtze River. The chariots and horses were densely buried," Liu Xu, a professor from School of Archaeology and Museology of Peking University told China Central Television (CCTV).

"Many of the wheels were taken off and the rest parts of the chariots were placed one by one."

In the three months they have been excavating, the archaeologists have also unearthed another pit, five metres away from the chariot pit, which holds at least 49 pairs of horse skeletons.

"Judging from the way the horses were buried, they were buried after they were killed, as there was no trace of struggle. Second, it is the way they were laid...back to back, lying on their sides. It means that two horses pull one chariot," said Huang Wenxin, researcher from the provincial archaeological institute.

The archaeologists say that the number of chariots buried with the tombs are meant to demonstrate the high ranks of the tomb owners, as well as the strength of the ruling state they lived in at the time.

"More chariots mean that the country was powerful. The strength was measured by the number of chariots. In modern words, the chariots represent a kind of high-tech product. Only people with rather high ranks can own chariots," Liu said.

The archaeologists still have a lot of work ahead of them in excavating the tombs, but so far over 400 pieces of bronze, pottery and other objects have been uncovered, including a bronze pot engraved with Old Chinese characters, a fine pottery container in the shape of a dragon, and a thin flat metal item with white Old Chinese characters painted on one side, that could have been a tool or a fixture.

Also discovered were some of the oldest musical instruments ever found in China, including a broken Se, a 25-string ancient zithersimilar to the guzheng, and the 4.7m-long frame of a Bianzhong (bronze chimes).

During the Spring and Autumn Period, the Zhou Dynasty was in control, but in reality they only had power their own capital Luoyi, located near present-day Luoyang.

In order to try and retain power, Zhou Dynasty kings gave away fiefdoms of land to royal relatives and generals, but as the kings' powers waned, these fiefdoms gradually all became independent states rife with interstate power struggles and civil wars.

At one point there were up to 148 independent states in China during the period, and by the end of the dynasty, 128 of these had been annexed by the four most powerful states. The great philosopher Confucius lived during the later part of the Zhou Dynasty, in the state of Lu.

One of these states was Chu, which covers most of present-day Hubei and Hunan province, so it can be surmised that the nobles buried in these tombs were related to the ruling house of Chu.

Chu became a fully independent state from the Zhou kings in either 703BC or 706BC, and the tombs are buried 320km away from the city of Ezhou, which was the capital of Chu during the Zhou Dynasty.
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Russon, Mary-Ann2015. “”. International Business Times. Posted: January 8, 2015. Available online: http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/china-30-tombs-28-chariots-98-horse-skeletons-dating-back-2800-years-found-hubei-1482500

Rapid Desert Formation May Have Destroyed China's 1st Kingdom

The first known Chinese kingdom may have been destroyed when its lands rapidly transformed into deserts, possibly driving its people into the rest of China, a new study finds.

This new finding suggests that the kingdom may have been more important to Chinese civilization than experts had thought, researchers say.

Prior research suggests the earliest Chinese kingdom might have been Hongshan, established about 6,500 years ago. This was about 2,400 years before the supposed rise of the Xia Dynasty, the first dynasty in China described in ancient historical chronicles. The kingdom's name, which means "Red Mountain," comes from the name of a site in the Inner Mongolia region of China.

Cultural artifacts

Past excavations have uncovered Hongshan sites across northern China, including the Goddess Temple, an underground complex in the northeastern Chinese province of Liaoning known for murals painted on its walls and a clay female head with jade inlaid eyes.

Hongshan displayed some of the earliest known examples of jade working. The first dragonlike symbol of China may have been a fishlike creature made of jade in Hongshan, researchers said.

But the importance of Hongshan to Chinese history remains a topic of debate, investigators added. The middle reaches of the Yellow Riverare commonly thought to be the cradle of Chinese civilization, and Hongshan was typically seen as a remote culture outside these key areas. However, the Goddess Temple, as well as remnants of sheep bones that indicate trade with Mongolian shepherds, suggest Hongshan had a complex culture.

"We seem to see evidence that Hongshan was far more important to early Chinese culture than it's currently given credit for," said study co-author Louis Scuderi, a paleoclimatologist at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. "Archaeologists are having a hard time figuring out what the importance of Hongshan culture was."

To shed light on Hongshan, scientists investigated the Hunshandake Sandy Lands of Inner Mongolia, in the eastern portion of northern China's desert belt. The researchers found abundant remnants of Hongshan pottery and stone artifacts there, in an area located about 185 miles (300 kilometers) west of where the Hongshan culture was first recognized in Liaoning. The variety and large number of artifacts found in the region suggest a relatively dense population that depended on hunting and fishing, the researchers said.

But the importance of Hongshan to Chinese history remains a topic of debate, investigators added. The middle reaches of the Yellow Riverare commonly thought to be the cradle of Chinese civilization, and Hongshan was typically seen as a remote culture outside these key areas. However, the Goddess Temple, as well as remnants of sheep bones that indicate trade with Mongolian shepherds, suggest Hongshan had a complex culture.

"We seem to see evidence that Hongshan was far more important to early Chinese culture than it's currently given credit for," said study co-author Louis Scuderi, a paleoclimatologist at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. "Archaeologists are having a hard time figuring out what the importance of Hongshan culture was."

To shed light on Hongshan, scientists investigated the Hunshandake Sandy Lands of Inner Mongolia, in the eastern portion of northern China's desert belt. The researchers found abundant remnants of Hongshan pottery and stone artifacts there, in an area located about 185 miles (300 kilometers) west of where the Hongshan culture was first recognized in Liaoning. The variety and large number of artifacts found in the region suggest a relatively dense population that depended on hunting and fishing, the researchers said.
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Choi, Charles Q. 2015. “Rapid Desert Formation May Have Destroyed China's 1st Kingdom”. Live Science. Posted: January 5, 2015. Available online: http://www.livescience.com/49321-earliest-china-kingdom-desert.html

Mystery of Ancient Chinese Civilization's Disappearance Explained

An earthquake nearly 3,000 years ago may be the culprit in the mysterious disappearance of one of China's ancient civilizations, new research suggests.

The massive temblor may have caused catastrophic landslides, damming up the Sanxingdui culture's main water source and diverting it to a new location.

That, in turn, may have spurred the ancient Chinese culture to move closer to the new river flow, study co-author Niannian Fan, a river sciences researcher at Tsinghua University in Chengdu, China, said Dec. 18 at the 47th annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.

Ancient civilization

In 1929, a peasant in Sichuan province uncovered jade and stone artifacts while repairing a sewage ditch located about 24 miles (40 kilometers) from Chengdu. But their significance wasn't understood until 1986, when archaeologists unearthed two pits of Bronze Age treasures, such as jades, about 100 elephant tusks and stunning 8-feet-high (2.4 meters) bronze sculptures that suggest an impressive technical ability that was present nowhere else in the world at the time, said Peter Keller, a geologist and president of the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, California, which is currently hosting an exhibit of some of these treasures.

The treasures, which had been broken and buried as if they were sacrificed, came from a lost civilization, now known as the Sanxingdui, a walled city on the banks of the Minjiang River.

"It's a big mystery," said Keller, who was not involved in the current study.

Archaeologists now believe that the culture willfully dismantled itself sometime between 3,000 and 2,800 years ago, Fan said.

"The current explanations for why it disappeared are war and flood, but both are not very convincing," Fan told Live Science.

But about 14 years ago, archaeologists found the remains of another ancient city called Jinsha near Chengdu. The Jinsha site, though it contained none of the impressive bronzes of Sanxingdui, did have a gold crown with a similar engraved motif of fish, arrows and birds as a golden staff found at Sanxingdui, Keller said. That has led some scholars to believe that the people from Sanxingdui may have relocated to Jinsha.

But why has remained a mystery.

Geological and historical clues

Fan and his colleagues wondered whether an earthquake may have caused landslides that dammed the river high up in the mountains and rerouted it to Jinsha. That catastrophe may have reduced Sanxingdui's water supply, spurring its inhabitants to move.

The valley where Sanxingdui sits has a large floodplain, with 4.3 miles (7 kilometers) of high terraced walls that were unlikely to have been cut by the small river that now flows through it, Fan said.

And some historical records support their hypothesis. In 1099 B.C., ancient writers recorded an earthquake in the capital of the Zhou dynasty, in Shaanxi province, Fan said. Though that spot is roughly 250 miles (400 kilometers) from the historic site of Sanxingdui, the latter culture didn't have writing at the time, so it's possible the earthquake epicenter was actually close to Sanxingdui — but it just wasn't recorded there, Fan said. Geological evidence also suggests that an earthquake occurred in the general region between 3,330 and 2,200 years ago, he added.

Around the same time, geological sediments suggest massive flooding occurred, and the later-Han dynasty document "The Chronicles of the Kings of Shu" records ancient floods pouring from a mountain in a spot that suggests the flow being rerouted, Fan said.  (Around 800 years later, Jinsha residents built a wall to prevent flooding.)

A river rerouted?

Together, the findings hint that a major earthquake triggered a landslide that dammed the river, rerouting its flow and reducing water flow to Sanxingdui, Fan said.

But if so, where did the river get rerouted? The team found clues high up in the mountains in the deep and wide Yanmen Ravine, at about 12,460 feet (3,800 meters) above sea level.

The modern-day river cuts through the ravine, which was carved by glaciers about 12,000 years ago. Yet the telltale signs of that glacial erosion — bowl-shaped basins known as cirques — are mysteriously absent for a long stretch of the ravine. The team hypothesizes that an earthquake spurred an avalanche that then wiped out some of the cirques about 3,000 years ago.

At this point, the theory is still very speculative, and additional geological data is needed to buttress it, Fan said.

And while the geological story is possible, Keller said, it doesn't answer the basic question: "What would motivate people to destroy their entire culture and bury it in two pits? And why didn't the culture reemerge at Jinsha?"
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Ghose, Tia. 2015. “Mystery of Ancient Chinese Civilization's Disappearance Explained”. Live Science. Posted: December 24, 2014. Available online: http://www.livescience.com/49247-chinese-civilization-disappearance-explained.html

Mixed agriculture in northern China developed at similar time to the Near East

An international research team has found the earliest evidence for chicken domestication to date. Researchers obtained mitochondrial DNA sequences from up to 10,000 year old chicken fossils originating from northern China. At this age, the sequences are several thousands of years older than any other chicken ancient DNA sequences reported previously.

Michi Hofreiter, of the University of Potsdam in Germany and an Honorary Professor in York’s Department of Biology, led the research with Professor Xingbo Zhao from China Agricultural University in Beijing.

Genetic continuity

Despite their age, the northern Chinese chicken sequences already represent the three major groups of mitochondrial DNA sequences present in the modern chicken gene pool, suggesting genetic continuity between these oldest chicken bones known worldwide and modern chicken populations. The research is reported in PNAS.

Based on modern DNA sequences scientists had already suggested that chickens had been domesticated in different places in south and south-east Asia, but previously northern China had never been suggested as a location for chicken domestication.

Different climate and vegetation

Professor Xingbo Zhao said: “People argued that northern China did not provide suitable habitat for red jungle fowl, the wild ancestor of domestic chickens but they do not take into account that climate and vegetation were very different 10,000 years ago.”

The results not only suggest northern China as one of the earliest places for chicken domestication but also that the domestication of chicken, today the most important poultry species in the world, started as early as those of the other four agriculturally important animal species, cattle, pigs, goat and sheep. Moreover, the results provide further evidence for an early agricultural complex in northern China.

Professor Hofreiter, who is also an associate member of the University of York’s Palaeo research centre, added: “These are really exciting results as they suggest that societies with mixed agriculture developed in northern China around the same time they did so in the Near East”.
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Past Horizons. 2015. “Mixed agriculture in northern China developed at similar time to the Near East”. Past Horizons. Posted: November 25, 2014. Available online: http://www.pasthorizonspr.com/index.php/archives/11/2014/mixed-agriculture-in-northern-china-developed-at-similar-time-to-the-near-east

1,700-Year-Old Silk Road Cemetery Contains Mythical Carvings

A cemetery dating back roughly 1,700 years has been discovered along part of the Silk Road, a series of ancient trade routes that once connected China to the Roman Empire.

The cemetery was found in the city of Kucha, which is located in present-day northwest China. Ten tombs were excavated, seven of which turned out to be large brick structures.

One tomb, dubbed "M3," contained carvings of severalmythical creatures, including four that represent different seasons and parts of the heavens: the White Tiger of the West, the Vermilion Bird of the South, the Black Turtle of the North and the Azure Dragon of the East.

The M3 tomb also "consists of a burial mound, ramp, sealed gate, tomb entrance, screen walls, passage, burial chamber and side chamber" the researchers wrote in a report published recently in the journal Chinese Cultural Relics.

The cemetery was first found in July 2007 and was excavated by the Xinjiang Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, with assistance from local authorities. The research team, led by Zhiyong Yu, director of the Xinjiang Archaeological Institute, published the findings in Chinese in the journal Wenwu. The article was recently translated into English and published in the journal Chinese Cultural Relics.

Who was buried here?

The identity of the people buried in the cemetery is a mystery. The cemetery had been robbed in the past and no writing was found that indicates the names of those buried or their positions in life.

The seven large brick tombs were likely constructed for people of wealth, the researchers said.

But, when the skeletal remains were analyzed, the researchers found that the tombs had been reused multiple times. Some of the tombs contain more than 10 occupants, and the "repeated multiple burials warrant further study," the researchers wrote.

City on the Silk Road

The excavators think the cemetery dates back around 1,700 years, to a time when Kucha was vital to controlling the Western Frontiers (Xiyu) of China. Since the Silk Road trade routes passed through the Western Frontiers, control of this key region was important to China’s rulers.

"In ancient times, Kucha was called Qiuci in Chinese literature. It was a powerful city-state in the oasis of the Western Frontiers" the researchers wrote.

For the dynasties that flourished in China around 1,700 years ago "the conquest and effective governance of Kucha would enable them to control all the oasis city-states in the Western Frontiers," the researchers said.

In fact, one ancient saying was, "if you have Kucha, only one percent of the states in the Western Frontiers remain unsubmissive."

Chinese Cultural Relics is a new journal that translates Chinese-language articles, originally published in the journal Wenwu, into English. The discovery of the 1,700-year-old cemetery was included in its inaugural issue.
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Jarus, Owen. 2015. “1,700-Year-Old Silk Road Cemetery Contains Mythical Carvings”. Live Science. Posted: November 24, 2014. Available online: http://www.livescience.com/48878-ancient-silk-road-cemetery-discovered.html

1,000-Year-Old Tomb Reveals Murals, Stars & Poetry

A 1,000-year-old tomb with a ceiling decorated with stars and constellations has been discovered in northern China.

Found not far from a modern day railway station, the circular tomb has no human remains but instead has murals which show vivid scenes of life. "The tomb murals mainly depict the daily domestic life of the tomb occupant," and his travels with horses and camels, a team of researchers wrote in their report on the tomb recently published in the journal Chinese Cultural Relics.

On the east wall, people who may have served as attendants to the tomb's occupant are shown holding fruit and drinks. There is also a reclining deer, a crane, bamboo trees, a crawling yellow turtle and a poem. The poem reads in part, "Time tells that bamboo can endure cold weather. Live as long as the spirits of the crane and turtle."

The tomb also contains images of what appear to be the occupant's pets. On the north wall, there is "a black and white cat with a red ribbon on its neck and a silk-strip ball in its mouth," the researchers wrote, with the same scene also showing "a black and white dog with a red ribbon on its neck and a curved tail." Male and female attendants are shown beside the cat and dog, with an empty bed lying between the animals.

The tomb's ceiling contains stars painted in a bright red color. The "completed constellations are formed by straight lines connecting the stars in relevant shapes and forms," the researchers wrote.

Archaeologists also found a small statue of the occupant. The statue is 3.1 feet (0.94 meters) tall, and shows a smiling man who is wearing a long black robe while sitting cross-legged on a platform. It could be that the statue was used as a substitute for the body in the burial, the researchers said, noting this practice wasn’t unusual among Buddhists at the time.

The tomb was found in Datong City and was excavated in 2011 by a team from the Datong Municipal Institute of Archaeology. The researchers reported their finds, in Chinese, in the journal Wenwu, and their article was recently translated into English and published in Chinese Cultural Relics. The excavation team was led by Junxi Liu.

Who was he?

The tomb was robbed in the past and the name of the tomb owner has not survived. Judging by his statue, and the decoration of his tomb, researchers said it's likely that the occupant was a Han Chinese man of some rank and wealth.

At the time he lived, about 1,000 years ago, the area where his tomb is located was controlled by the Liao Dynasty (sometimes called the Liao Empire). This dynasty was controlled by people called the Khitan, who held territory in modern- day Mongolia, northern China and parts of Russia.

Historical records indicate that the Khitan ruled a multicultural empire that incorporated Han Chinese into the government.

"The Khitan system of rule worked on a principle of dual administration, with its nomadic, pastoral, and mostly Khitan subjects in the north under the northern government and its agricultural, sedentary, and largely Chinese and Bohai subjects in the south under the southern government," writes Nicola Di Cosmo, a historian at the Institute for Advanced Study, in a chapter of the book "Gilded Splendor: Treasures of China's Liao Empire" (Asia Society, 2007).

Although we may never know the identity of the tomb occupant, or the position he held, this unknown man has left behind a colorful tomb full of life.

Chinese Cultural Relics is a new journal that translates Chinese-language articles, which were originally published in the journal Wenwu, into English. The mural tomb was included in its inaugural issue.
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Jarus, Owen. 2014. “1,000-Year-Old Tomb Reveals Murals, Stars & Poetry”. Live Science. Posted: November 11, 2014. Available online: http://www.livescience.com/48671-tomb-china-murals-stars-poetry.html

China Exclusive: Teenager stumbles on 3,000-year-old bronze sword in river

A child in east China's Jiangsu Province had a stroke of luck after lunging into a river and stumbling upon a 3,000-year-old bronze sword.

Yang Junxi, an 11-year-old boy, discovered upon the rusty sword on July 2 when he was playing near the Laozhoulin River in Linze Township of Gaoyou County, according to the Gaoyou Cultural Relics Bureau.

While washing hands in the river, Yang touched the tip of something hard and fished out the metal sword. He took it home and gave it to his father Yang Jinhai.

Upon hearing the news, people began flocking to Yang's home, the father said.

"Some people even offered high prices to buy the the sword, but I felt it would be illegal to sell the cultural relic," Yang said.

After considering his options, the father sent the sword to the Gaoyou Cultural Relics Bureau on Sept. 3.

The bureau arranged initial identifications on the sword with a joint team of local cultural relics experts on the sword's material, length, shape and other major factors.

Initial identifications found the 26 cm-long yellow-brown sword could be dated back to more than 3,000 years ago, around the time of the Shang and Zhou dynasties, said Lyu Zhiwei, head of the cultural relics office of the bureau.

"There was no characteristic or decorative pattern on the exquisite bronze sword. Made in a time of relatively low productivity, its owner would have been an able man with the qualification to have such artifact," he said.

"The short sword seems a status symbol of a civil official. It has both decorative and practical functions, but is not in the shape of sword for military officers."

It is the second bronze artifact found in the region after a bronze instrument was excavated in the nearby Sanduo Township.

The sword was found in the Laozhoulin River, which crosses the ancient Ziying River which was excavated in the Qin Dynasty (221 BC-206 BC).

It also interlinks the ancient Han Ditch as the "predecessor" of China's Grand Canal, the world's longest artificial waterway with a history of more than 2,400 years.

The 1,794-km canal runs from Beijing to Hangzhou in China's eastern Zhejiang Province. It was entered into the World Heritage list in June 2014.

The city has conducted several rounds of dredging in the Laozhoulin River, which might surface the sword from the river bottom, said Lyu, adding that the township government has prepared a further archeological dig into the river and in the nearby areas.

The relics bureau and municipal museum of Gaoyou City have sent the collection certificates and bonus for the boy and his father in honor of their deeds of protecting and donating cultural relic.
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Yi, Yang. 2014. “China Exclusive: Teenager stumbles on 3,000-year-old bronze sword in river”. Xinhua Net. Posted: September 6, 2014. Available online: http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/sci/2014-09/06/c_133625745.htm

Anthropocene 1000 BC: Mother Nature Not To Blame For Flooding Along The Yellow River

Nature gets a bad rap, according to a new paper. For thousands of years, fickle weather has been blamed for tremendous suffering caused by massive flooding along the Yellow River, long known in China as the "River of Sorrow" and "Scourge of the Sons of Han."

Not so, according to a new paper in the Journal of Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences. Instead, the Anthropocene Epoch didn't start 150 years ago, or even in 2000 A.D. when it was coined and became the buzzword for environmentalists worldwide - it started 3,000 years ago.

The authors blame the river's increasingly deadly floods to a long-term and widespread pattern of human-caused environmental degradation and related flood-mitigation efforts that began changing the river's natural flow that began with ancient construction of large-scale levees and other flood-control systems in China.

"Human intervention in the Chinese environment is relatively massive, remarkably early and nowhere more keenly witnessed than in attempts to harness the Yellow River," said T.R. Kidder, PhD, lead author of the study and an archaeologist at Washington University. "In some ways, these findings offer a new benchmark for the beginning of the Anthropocene, the epoch in which humans became the most dominant global force in nature."

A catastrophic flood

It also suggests that the Chinese government's long-running efforts to tame the Yellow River with levees, dikes and drainage ditches actually made periodic flooding much worse, setting the stage for a catastrophic flood circa A.D. 14-17, which likely killed millions and triggered the collapse of the Western Han Dynasty.

"New evidence from China and elsewhere show us that past societies changed environments far more than we've ever suspected," said Kidder, the Edward S. and Tedi Macias Professor in Arts&Sciences and chair of anthropology at WUSTL. "By 2,000 years ago, people were controlling the Yellow River, or at least thought they were controlling it, and that's the problem."

Kidder's research, co-authored with Liu Haiwang, senior researcher at China's Henan Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, relies on a sophisticated analysis of sedimentary soils deposited along the Yellow River over thousands of years.

It includes data from the team's ongoing excavations at the sites of two ancient communities in the lower Yellow River flood plain of China's Henan province.

The Sanyangzhuang site, known today as "China's Pompeii," was slowly buried beneath five meters of sediment during a massive flood circa A.D. 14
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References:

Science 20. 2014. “Anthropocene 1000 BC: Mother Nature Not To Blame For Flooding Along The Yellow River”. Science 20. Posted: June 19, 2014. Available online: http://www.science20.com/news_articles/anthropocene_1000_bc_mother_nature_not_to_blame_for_flooding_along_the_yellow_river-138944

Ancient Chinese Tea Bowls Hold Rare Iron Compound

Ancient Chinese tea bowls might hold the recipe for a rare form of iron oxide that scientists have had a hard time making in the lab.

Pure epsilon-phase iron oxide was unexpectedly discovered in the glaze of silvery Jian bowls made 1,000 years ago, a group of researchers announced this week.

Jian ceramic wares were created in China's Fujian Province during the Song dynasty between A.D. 960 and 1279. Today, examples can be found in museums like the Smithsonian's Freer and Sackler galleries in Washington, D.C., and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. But Jian bowls even had international appeal back in their day: They were highly valued in Japan, where they were used in tea ceremonies and known as Yohen Tenmoku.

Beyond retaining heat (an important quality for tea-drinkers), Jian vessels were famous for their dark, lustrous glaze, which was often streaked with patterns likened to "hare's fur," "oil spots" and "partridge spots." These characteristic designs came from molten iron flux in the glaze, which flowed down the sides of the bowls and crystallized into iron oxides while cooling in the kiln, researchers say.

A team of scientists, led by Catherine Dejoie of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in California, wanted to investigate the microstructure and local chemical composition of this type of ancient pottery. They used X-ray diffraction and electron microscopy techniques to analyze the tiny quirks on Jian pottery fragments provided by the museum of the Fujian province. Hare's fur patterns on Jian bowls, once thought to contain just the mineral hematite, were found to have small quantities of epsilon-phase iron oxide, the scientists said. The researchers also found that oil spot patterns, thought to be made of the mineral magnetite, remarkably contain large quantities of pure epsilon-phase iron oxide.

Though epsilon-phase iron oxide was first identified 80 years ago, scientists have only managed to grow tiny crystals of this material that are often contaminated with hematite. Scientists think this type of iron oxide could hold the key to better, cheaper permanent magnets used in electronics, because it has extremely persistent magnetization, high resistance to corrosion and a lack of toxicity.

"The next step will be to understand how it is possible to reproduce the quality of epsilon-phase iron oxide with modern technology," Dejoie, a scientist at Berkley Lab's Advanced Light Source and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, said in a statement. "And to identify and extract synthesis conditions and other factors to obtain large crystals of pure epsilon phase."

The findings were published online May 13 in the journal Scientific Reports.
_________________ References:

Gannon, Megan. 2014. “Ancient Chinese Tea Bowls Hold Rare Iron Compound”. Live Science. Posted: May 16, 2014. Available online: http://www.livescience.com/45667-rare-iron-oxide-ancient-chinese-bowls.html

World's Oldest Decimal Times Table Found in China

The newly deciphered multiplication table, written on bamboo strips dated to 310 B.C., was more sophisticated than earlier versions.

Q: How much is 230 times 10?

A: The number of years humans have been calculating with decimals.

A crack team of scholars in Beijing learned this last year when they solved a 23-centuries-old puzzle. And it only took them five years.

The complex mathematical problem arose in 2008, when an alumnus of Tsinghua University donated a bundle of ink-inscribed bamboo strips he'd bought at a Hong Kong art market.

But the strips were an inscrutable mess. They were out of order, and some were broken. All were reeking, caked in mud and mold.

Clearly they'd come from a looted tomb. But what were they?

Cracking the Code

On the top floor of Tsinghua's Research and Conservation Center for Excavated Texts, a multidisciplinary team of researchers got together—and got to work. Laying out the 2,500 strips in a climate-controlled room, they spent three painstaking months drying and cleaning them.

"We had to be very careful," says Wen Xing, a paleography professor at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, who was involved from the start. "They were saturated with water, so we had to stop the mold from growing and making them completely rotten. And we had to use soft brushes, to keep the ink on the strips. It was a very difficult process."

But it paid off. They could soon see a vertical line of calligraphy, brushed in black ink, on each strip, which were 20 inches (51 centimeters) long and a half inch (1.27 centimeters) wide. After they applied antioxidizing chemicals, they carbon-dated the batch to 310 B.C.

For the next four years Xing and his colleagues read through every strip, sorting them by their content and calligraphy style—and finding more than 60 discrete texts.

"Most were historical works," says Xing, "including chapters from the Book of Documents, [which is] one of the Five Classics [of the Confucian canon]. There were some military texts too, all written in a beautiful style used in the ancient state of Chu."

Yet 21 of the strips stood out. They were painted with numerical characters, not alphabetical ones. When Feng Lisheng, a math historian at Tsinghua, placed them in the proper order, they formed a base-10 multiplication matrix—the oldest decimal-based calculator in the world.

How It Works

It looks a lot like a modern multiplication table. The top row and the far-right column contain the same 19 numbers: 0.5, the integers 1 through 9, and multiples of 10 from 10 to 90.

It's remarkably simple to use, says Joseph Dauben, a distinguished history professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

To multiply 8 times 7, for example, find the 8 on the top row and the 7 on the far-right column. Follow the numbers beneath the 8 until they intersect with the numbers to the left of the 7. The answer is at the intersection: 56.

"You can see [the answer] at a glance," says Dauben. "And that's probably its great virtue. It's impressive the way this thing is put together."

(The Chinese written system didn't use a symbol for zero, because it didn't need one. When Chinese mathematicians recorded the result of a computation, says Dauben, they used a specific character for each power of ten. So for 57 they would write 5 tens and a 7. But for 507 they would write 5 hundreds and a 7.)

The Tsinghua table also lets you multiply partial numbers between 0.5 and 99.5, though to do that you have to first convert the equations into sums. For instance, (29.5 × 31.5) would be (20 + 9 + 0.5) × (30 + 1 + 0.5). That creates nine separate multiplications (20 × 30, 20 × 1, 20 × 0.5, then 9 × 30, and so on), each of which can be read off the table. Adding up the answers gives you the final result.

But to what end? Feng says he suspects the table was used to calculate land area, crop yields, and taxes. "We can even use the matrix to do divisions and square roots," he says. "But we can't be sure that such complicated tasks were performed at the time."

Guo Shuchun of the Chinese Academy of Sciences calls the table "very advanced for the world at that time, an important discovery in the mathematical history of China—and the world."

On the Timeline of Math

"Mathematics," says Dauben, "has been around since someone looked up and realized there was a sun and a moon and objects around them. The record of human counting goes back to prehistoric caves, to Paleolithic times, with lines indicating times between months or how many animals were killed on a given day."

"Like the art found in southern France and northwestern Spain," writes Marlboro College math professor Joseph Mazur in his book Enlightening Symbols: A Short History of Mathematical Notation and Its Hidden Powers, "number writing came about through the human endeavor to record. ... Humans have always had an uncanny ability to recognize numbers beyond the values for which they had words."

After humans learned to count, they developed arithmetic. In the West, that started with the ancient Babylonians and Egyptians. According to Mazur, Sumerian cuneiform number writing dates to 3400 B.C. And well before 2000 B.C. both civilizations were adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing.

Yet they did it differently than we do. The Babylonian number system was sexagesimal, or base 60—the basis for 60 seconds, 60 minutes, and 360 degrees. And their multiplication tables, says Dauben, were used to compute fractions.

"But they weren't a matrix setup like [the Tsinghua table], where you take a number and can run down the column to any other given number and find out what the product is going to be."

The Egyptians did use a base-10 system like ours—perhaps based on having 10 fingers and 10 toes—but they didn't have place values. So they represented orders of magnitude with different symbols in hieroglyphs (a coiled rope for 100, a lotus flower for 1,000) or a cursive system called Hieratic.

The Chinese weren't far behind.

"China has had written numerals since as early as the Shang Dynasty, circa 1200 B.C. or slightly earlier," says Dauben. Compared with the Greeks of their time, "they made comparable achievements. It's sometimes said that they didn't develop the concept of 'proof' that's fundamental to Euclid and Archimedes, but this is wrong. They [may not have used] an abstract axiomatic method—and much of their math was based on practical concerns like business, bureaucracy, astronomy, and calendars—but they understood the importance of being able to prove that their results were correct."

What's more, he says, "Chinese mathematicians stayed at the mathematical forefront until the Renaissance, when the rebirth of ancient mathematics in the West soon led to new methods that advanced the algebra of the Islamic world and forged new methods, including Descartes's analytic geometry and the infinitesimal calculus of Newton and Leibniz."

That's also when decimal tables appeared in Europe. Though records show they existed as early as the 12th century A.D., they weren't used widely until the Renaissance, when the printing press aided their spread.

Sign of the Times

The multiplication table deciphered at Tsinghua wasn't the first one found in China. But it was particularly sophisticated and practical.

Earlier examples, says Dauben, "only list the results of multiplication: 9 times 9 is 81, 9 times 8 is 72, et cetera. What makes the Tsinghua table unique is its matrix structure, and the simplicity with which it allows any multiplications—or divisions or even, possibly, the determinations of square roots—simply by reference to the table.

"It's considerably more advanced than later times tables produced in the Qin Dynasty. Those tables date to between 221 and 206 B.C., and they show simple sentences like the kind you recited in class: 'Two times one is two, two times two is four, two times three is six.' You can't really use sentences to calculate elaborate multiplications, never mind divisions, square roots, et cetera, in the same way you can with a matrix."

The Tsinghua table was made during the Warring States period, says Xing, a century before the first Qin Dynasty emperor, Qin Shi Huang, unified China.

One of the emperor's first undertakings was to try to stamp out the ideas of Confucius and other philosophers he deemed a threat to his authority. He executed scholars, rewrote texts, burned books, and banned private libraries.

The bamboo strips at Tsinghua escaped that fate, probably because they were buried underground in a tomb. Their survival offers us a glimpse of life—historical, intellectual, philosophical—during a formative period in China.

"They tell us about thinking in early China," says Xing. "They were using characters to describe numbers and do calculations. It also helps establish the place-value system, a crucial development in the history of math. This is material evidence of that."

Over the next 50 years, says Dauben, "the archaeology that's coming out of China is going to change our understanding of history. And this [times table is] just one good example. Until this thing turned up, nobody had a clue that the Chinese had been so clever as to present an immediate visual understanding of multiplication."
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References:

Berlin, Jeremy. 2014. “World's Oldest Decimal Times Table Found in China”. National Geographic News. Posted: April 5, 2014. Available online: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/04/140405-chinese-oldest-multiplication-table-decimal/

770,000 year old Peking Man’s controlled use of fire confirmed

For decades, the so-called Peking Man (Homo erectus pekinensis) from Zhoukoudian (south west of modern Beijing) has been considered to be a hominin that engaged in the controlled production and management of fire. This hypothesis, however likely, was never based on solid proof, until recently that is, when Chinese scientists announced that they had analysed ash from the archaeological site.

Nearly 100 years of discovery

Excavations at a site known locally as “Dragon Bone Hill” unearthed two hominin molars in the 1920s. Afterwards Canadian anatomist Davidson Black of the Peking Union Medical College, secured funding from the Rockefeller Foundation to do more excavations at Zhoukoudian. In the Autumn of 1927 a single tooth was unearthed by Swedish palaeontologist Anders Birger Bohlin.

Black published his analysis in the journal Nature, identifying the find as belonging to a new species and genus which he named Sinanthropus pekinensis, but many fellow scientists were sceptical about such an identification on the basis of a single tooth. The Rockefeller Foundation demanded more specimens before it would grant additional money.

A lower jaw, several teeth, along with some skull fragments were unearthed in 1928. Black presented these finds to the Foundation and was rewarded with an $80,000 grant.

Excavations continued at the site under the supervision of Chinese archaeologists Yang Zhongjian, Pei Wenzhong, and Jia Lanpo. This time they uncovered 200 fossils (including six nearly complete skullcaps) from more than 40 individual specimens. These excavations came to an end in 1937 with the Japanese invasion and resumed again after the war. The Peking Man Site at Zhoukoudian was listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site in 1987 and new excavations were started in June 2009.

Use of fire called into question

Recent age determinations for the Zhoukoudian sequence have shown that Homo erectus pekinensis seems to have first occupied Locality 1 some 770,000 years ago, when climatic conditions in North China were relatively cold. In order to survive the harsh weather Homo erectus pekinensis would have needed to be able to create and manage fire. By the 1930s the presence and control of fire had become a widely accepted concept for the site because several ash deposits had been found there. However, more recently this evidence had been called into question, as siliceous aggregate (an insoluble phase of burned ash) was not found to be present in the remains recovered.

New evidence

Study co-author, Dr. GAO Xing, an archaeologist at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, presented new evidence in the journal Chinese Science Bulletin 59(3) that can now confirm the controlled use of fire by Homo erectus pekinensis. Through analyses of four soil samples obtained in 2009 from Layers 4 and 6 at Zhoukoudian Locality 1., the scientists demonstrated that all four specimens contain siliceous aggregates as well as elemental carbon, and the potassium content of the insoluble residues of these specimens ranges between 1.21 % and 2.94 %. This analyses provides very strong evidence for the in situ use of fire by Homo erectus pekinensis.
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References:

Past Horizons. 2014. “770,000 year old Peking Man’s controlled use of fire confirmed”. Past Horizons. Posted: March 12, 2014. Available online: http://www.pasthorizonspr.com/index.php/archives/03/2014/770000-year-old-peking-mans-controlled-use-of-fire-confirmed

Secrets of Chinese Terra-Cotta Warrior Weapons Revealed

One of the most astounding archaeological discoveries of the 20th century is arguably the life-size terra-cotta army buried alongside China's first emperor. Now, scientists have figured out how the bronze triggers for the crossbows of the 8,000 terra-cotta warriors were manufactured.

Teams of craftspeople worked in small groups to produce the bronze pieces in batches for the tomb of ancient Emperor Qin Shi Huang, according to a new study detailed in the March issue of the journal Antiquity.

Historical documents suggest that soon after Emperor Qin Shi Huang ascended to the throne in 246 B.C., he began work on his tomb near Xi'an, China. When the tomb was first unearthed in the 1970s,it revealed thousands of lifelike terra-cotta statues of artisans, musicians, officials, horses and soldiers. The epic effort conscripted 700,000 laborers, many of whom were convicts or people who were in debt to the empire, said study co-author Xiuzhen Janice Li, an archaeologist who was at the University College London at the time of the new work and is now at the Emperor Qin Shi Huang’s Mausoleum Site Museum in China.

The massive undertaking had an important goal: ensuring the emperor's military power and resources in the afterlife.

As part of the huge project, craftspeople sculpted about 8,000 colorful warriors — likely using real human beings as inspiration — and those warriors wore stone armor and "wielded" lances, swords and crossbows.

But it wasn't clear exactly how these ancient weapons were made. The crossbows were made of wood or bamboo that rotted long ago, and only the tips and triggers for the bows remained, Li told Live Science.

Small workshops

To learn more about how the massive trove was built, Li and her colleagues visually inspected and measured about 216 of the five-part crossbow triggers from the mausoleum.

The lack of wear on the metal pieces suggests the weapons were never used in actual battle, but were instead built solely for the tomb, the researchers said.

In addition, the team analyzed the spots where triggers were found in the tomb, as well as the variation in the size and shape of the pieces.

The pieces were mostly uniform, suggesting the interlocking trigger parts were made in the same or nearly-identical molds and produced in small batches. Each batch of the trigger pieces was likely then assembled in small cells, or workshops, perhaps headed by an overseer.  That model contrasts with the "assembly line" hypothesis that some archaeologists thought might have been used.

Mirror of society

The organization into small workshops was similar to the structure the emperor imposed on the rest of society in ancient China, said study co-author Marcos Martinón-Torres, an archaeologist at the University College London.

"He abolished any privileges inherited by blood, and the population was divided in small groups that were collectively responsible for their adherence to imperial laws," Martinón-Torres wrote in an email to Live Science. "For example, if someone in one of these groups committed a crime, all of them were held responsible, unless they reported the culprit and allowed them to be punished."

The manufacturing technique used in the workshop also may have been used by weapon makers for the Emperor of Qin's real armies, though that's just speculation, Martinón-Torres said.

"The cellular workshop model we postulate for the weapons manufacture in the mausoleum would have also offered useful flexibility for armies on the move," he said.
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References:

Ghose, Tia. 2014. “Secrets of Chinese Terra-Cotta Warrior Weapons Revealed”. Live Science. Posted: March 11, 2014. Available online: http://www.livescience.com/44024-terracotta-warrior-weapons-construction.html

Researchers uncover origins of cattle farming in China

An international team of researchers, co-led by scientists at the University of York and Yunnan Normal University, has produced the first multi-disciplinary evidence for management of cattle populations in northern China, around the same time cattle domestication took place in the Near East, over 10,000 years ago.

The domestication of cattle is a key achievement in human history. Until now, researchers believed that humans started domesticating cattle around 10,000 years ago in the Near East, which gave rise to humpless (taurine) cattle, while two thousand years later humans began managing humped cattle (zebu) in Southern Asia.

However, the new research, which is published in Nature Communications, reveals morphological and genetic evidence for management of cattle in north-eastern China around 10,000 years ago, around the same time the first domestication of taurine cattle took place in the Near East. This indicates that humans may have started domesticating cows in more regions around the world than was previously believed.

A lower jaw of an ancient cattle specimen was discovered during an excavation in north-east China, and was carbon dated to be 10,660 years old. The jaw displayed a unique pattern of wear on the molars, which, the researchers say, is best explained to be the results of long-term human management of the animal. Ancient DNA from the jaw revealed that the animal did not belong to the same cattle lineages that were domesticated in the Near East and South Asia.

The combination of the age of the jaw, the unique wear and genetic signature suggests that this find represents the earliest evidence for cattle management in north-east China; a time and place not previously considered as potential domestication centre for cattle.

The research was co-led in the Department of Biology at the University of York by Professor Michi Hofreiter and Professor Hucai Zhang of Yunnan Normal University.

Professor Hofreiter said: "The specimen is unique and suggests that, similar to other species such as pigs and dogs, cattle domestication was probably also a complex process rather than a sudden event." Johanna Paijmans, the PhD student at York who performed the DNA analysis, said: "This is a really exciting example of the power of multi-disciplinary research; the wear pattern on the lower jaw itself is already really interesting, and together with the carbon dating and ancient DNA we have been able to place it in an even bigger picture of early cattle management."
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References:

EurekAlert. 2013. “Researchers uncover origins of cattle farming in China”. EurekAlert. Posted: November 8, 2013. Available online: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-11/uoy-ruo110713.php