First evidence of legendary flood reveals China’s origin story

Legend has it that a great flood engulfed China 4000 years ago. Lasting for more than 20 years, it was finally tamed by the heroic efforts of Emperor Yu, whose Xia dynasty marked the birth of Chinese civilisation and its transition into the Bronze Age.

“This was the first stage in the founding of Chinese civilisation,” says Wu Qinglong of Nanjing Normal University. “But no scientific evidence had been discovered until now.”

This lack of evidence for such a flood had prompted some to challenge the truth of the story.

But we now have the first compelling evidence that the flood did actually happen at the time and place chronicled in the legend.

In the Jishi Gorge, along the Yellow river, his team discovered rocks and sedimentary formations that could only have existed as a result of a cataclysmic flood.

They also found evidence of an earthquake and analysed the skeletons of three children (see picture below), which helped them recreate the timeline of what happened.

“The first thing was the earthquake, and this triggered a huge landslide that blocked the river,” says Darryl Granger of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. The dammed water became a lake 200 metres deep.

“The lake built up behind and took six to nine months to fill up before the water overtopped, causing the dam to fail catastrophically,” he says.

This released a huge volume of water, estimated at between 12 and 17 cubic kilometres, two to three times as much as contained by Loch Ness in Scotland.

The floods engulfed Lajia, the archaeological site 25 kilometres downstream where the bodies of the three children killed by the earthquake months earlier lay buried, and where the world’s oldest noodles were found.

Rocks and debris deposited by the floodwaters around the children’s home show the earthquake and flood must have happened within a year of each other. The clinching evidence for this was that cracks in Lajia created by the quake were filled with flood-related sediment, not the fine silt sediment deposited by annual rainwater runoff at the same site each year, showing that the flood sediment got there first, and so must have arrived within a year of the quake.

And radiocarbon dating of the skeletons showed the children died around 1920 BC, roughly in accordance with the time of the legend.

“It corresponds so closely in time with the legends of the flood and the beginning of the Bronze Age in China,” says David Cohen, an anthropologist at National Taiwan University.

Cohen says that according to the historical accounts, it took Emperor Yu 22 years to bring the floodwaters under control through massive dredging operations, after which he established the dynasty marking China’s transition to modernisation.

“In the accounts, the hero Yu was able to control the flood through dredging, bringing order from chaos,” says Cohen. “It’s very much about the establishment of a new political order and the principles of rulership that went with it.”

“The flood they document is in the right place and time to explain the origin of Yu’s flood,” says David Montgomery of the University of Washington in Seattle. “The case they’ve put together is quite compelling, but it doesn’t settle whether the flood reported was indeed the origin of this ancient flood story.”

“It’s probably beyond the reach of science to ‘prove’ the origin of an oral tradition handed down generation to generation for a thousand years before the first written records,” he says. “But it supports the historicity of events central to the early history of Chinese civilisation, and provides another example of how some of humanity’s oldest stories — tales often taken as mythology or folklore — may be rooted in natural disasters that really happened.”
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Reference:

Coghlan, Andy. 2016. “First evidence of legendary flood reveals China’s origin story”. New Scientist. Posted: August 4, 2016. Available online: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2100038-first-evidence-of-legendary-flood-reveals-chinas-origin-story/

'Peking Man' Was a Fashion Plate

"Peking Man," a human ancestor who lived in China between roughly 200,000 and 750,000 years ago, was a wood-working, fire-using, spear-hafting hominid who, mysteriously, liked to drill holes into objects for unknown reasons.

And, yes, these hominids, a form of Homo erectus, appear to have been quite meticulous about their clothing, using stone tools to soften and depress animal hides.

The new discoveries paint a picture of a human ancestor who was more sophisticated than previously believed.

Peking Man was first discovered in 1923 in a cave near the village of Zhoukoudian, close to Beijing (at that time called Peking). During 1941, at the height of World War II, fossils of Peking Man went missing, depriving scientists of valuable information.

Recently, researchers have embarked on a re-excavation of the cave site searching for artifacts and answers as to how the Peking Man lived. Just as importantly, they engaged in new lab work that includes using powerful microscopes to look at artifacts made by Peking Man to determine how they were used, a process archaeologists called "use-wear" analysis.

On Dec. 15, four of these scientists gathered at Toronto's Royal Ontario Museum to give an update on their most recent findings. Three of the scientists, Xing Gao, Yue Zhang and Shuangquan Zhang are with the Chinese Academy of Science's Institute of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Palaeoanthropology. The fourth, Chen Shen, is a curator at the Toronto museum and a special member of the academy.

Among their archaeological findings is a 300,000-year-old "activity floor" (as the scientists call it) containing what may be a hearth and fireplace, akin to a prehistoric living room. Analysis is ongoing and Yue Zhang noted that 3D scanners are being used to map it. If the results hold up, it may prove once and for all that Peking Man was able to control fire, an important skill given the chilly weather at times in northern China.

Spear discovery

The use-wear analysis of Peking Man's tools yielded several interesting finds. Chen Shen said that analysis of the base of Peking Man's stone tools reveal that the hominid "likely" attached stone points to sticks creating a sort of spear. It's an important step in human development as it involves putting two materials, the stone tip and stick, together to form a composite tool.

Scientists are still trying to determine the details. For instance, Shen said it is possible that Peking Man was making spears with short sticks. While not as useful for hunting, the short stick would act as "an extension of the tool," and "you can hold it while you are scrapping or engraving," Shen said in an interview with LiveScience. Researchers are also trying to determine whether Peking Man used some form of sticky organic material to aid in the process of hafting a spear.

Another question is how this fits, chronologically, with other recent prehistoric findings. Just last month, scientists working in South Africa reported in the journal Science that another hominid named Homo heidelbergensis was making spears500,000 years ago (in its case likely to hunt animals). This leaves researchers with the question whether Peking Man, a different hominid, started making spears at around the same time.

More mysteries

The team also found evidence through the use-wear analysis that Peking Man was working wood (which didn't preserve in the cave) with their stone tools, possibly to turn it into wooden tools.

Perhaps the strangest finding was evidence for "drilling." Shen explained they don't know what the hominids were drilling into, or why, but they were certainly engaging in it with their stone tools. There is no evidence so far that Peking Man made ornaments or what we would consider art.

Finally, the analysis shows that Peking Man had an interest in clothes. "A certain proportion of tools were being used for the working and scraping of hides," Shen said in the interview..

"If they are depressing the hides, if they are softening hides, they can use the hides for their clothes," something no sophisticated hominids would dare live without.
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References:

Jarus, Owen. 2013. “'Peking Man' Was a Fashion Plate”. Live Science. Posted: December 31, 2012. Available online: http://www.livescience.com/25887-peking-man-hominid-fashion.html

30,000 year old engraved stone found in China intrigues archaeologists

Cognition and symbolic thought are often viewed as important features of modern human behaviour. Engraved objects are seen as hallmarks of this cognition and symbolism and even as evidence for language, indeed they are usually considered as one of the most important features of modern behaviour.

Careful re-analysis of lithic assemblage

During analysis in 2012 of the stone tools that had been unearthed at the Shuidonggou site in 1980, an interesting engraved stone artefact was discovered among the assemblage.

Dr Fei Peng, postdoctoral research fellow at the Graduate University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and lead author of the paper in the Chinese Science Bulletin that reported the discovery was amazed at what they found.

“It is the first engraved non-organic artefact from the whole Palaeolithic period in China”, Dr Peng said. However, this discovery was not entirely a lucky coincidence as the team were aware that when analysing materials unearthed from the site during excavations in the 1920s, French archaeologist Henry Breuil observed parallel incisions on the surface of some of the siliceous pebbles.

Unfortunately, he did not provide any further details regarding the incised pebbles he had noticed, so during the lithic analysis the team took great care to be aware of the potential existence of engraved objects.

The artefact in question is made of a siliceous limestone and measures 68 x 36 x 23 mm. One of the cortical faces bears 8 lines, clearly visible to the naked eye and inscribed deeply into the thick cortex. All the incisions are perpendicular to the long axis of the core and while two incisions are crossed the others are roughly parallel.

Prof Xing Gao of the Institute of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Palaeoanthropology in Beijing, co-author of the paper, said:“[the] Shuidonggou site includes 12 localities, ranging in date from Early Late to Late Palaeolithic. The engraved stone artefact was found at Locality 1, which is [dated to] 30,000 years old.”

Examination confirms the discovery

Digital microscopy was used to further examine every incision and 3D images were created to enable examination of the artefact at the minutest level.

After excluding the possibility of natural cracking, animal-induced damage and even unintentional human by-products, it has been concluded that the incisions could only be made by intentional and deliberate behaviour.

Although the function of these incisions is uncertain, the straight shape of each line shows it was incised once over a short time interval without repeated re-cutting, implying the intriguing possibility of counting.

In addition to the engraved stone artefact, a single ostrich egg bead was unearthed from Locality 1. The lithic assemblage of this locality includes blade production and elongated tool blanks. A blade technology that was probably introduced from the Altai region of Russian Siberia, matching comparable lithic assemblages.

Further questions

As it stands, a definitive scenario cannot be provided by the archaeological team, making a requirement for more research into this particular puzzle. This discovery opens up new questions regarding the creators of both the ostrich eggshell beads and the engraved stone. Were they made by the populations who migrated from the west, perhaps from what is now the Altai region, or were they the result of acculturation, where a population in north China learned this technology from an incoming group or individual? Perhaps they were created by the local people themselves as part of a cognitive advancement?
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References:

Past Horizons. 2012. “30,000 year old engraved stone found in China intrigues archaeologists”. Past Horizons. Posted: December 5, 2012. Available online: http://www.pasthorizonspr.com/index.php/archives/12/2012/30000-year-old-engraved-stone-found-in-china-intrigues-archaeologists