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Exploring China

The Beginnings of Civilization

Yangshao Villages About 7,000 years ago there were many farming villages along the Yellow River Valley. The people of these villages used polished stone tools, grew millet, wheat and barley and collected fruits from the forest and fish from the rivers. They kept animals such as pigs and dogs and made pottery jars to store their food. They decorated their pottery with beautiful patterns of plants, animals and humans. We know from excavated human remains that when a person died he or she was buried in a public cemetery behind the houses of the village. Each village built a large central house for public meetings. T his is an artist’s impression of a Yangshao village. These villages were usually ruled by female chiefs. The largest building in the illustration is the village meeting house.

T hi s map shows the locations of some of the earliest civilizations in China. I n the nineteenth century, Western historians believed that people traveled to China from Mesopotamia about 5,000 years ago. But archaeologists have now found traces of human activity all over China from all periods of time. Peking Man In 1929, a young Chinese archaeologist, Pei Wenzhong (1904- 82), found a seven-million-year- old human skull which he called “Peking Man.” Peking Man lived in caves at Zhoukoudian, a hilly area near China’s modern-day capital of Beijing. We know that millions of years ago people made stone tools and used fire to cook and to protect themselves from the cold. Seven million years ago Zhoukoudian was surrounded by rivers and grasslands , and wild animals lived in the bushes and forests. The early humans hunted deer in the forests and gathered fruit from trees to survive.

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