Archaeologists Look To Find Lost 1,000 Years

Shanghai Daily ^ | 11-26-2005

[blam]

Archaeologists look to find lost 1,000 years

2005-11-26 Beijing Time

AN archaeological project is expected to outline the chronology in the prehistoric millennium from 4,500 years ago to 3,500 years ago to decode the origin of Chinese civilization.

The government-backed project, called "Pre-research on the Origin of the Chinese Civilization," was launched in June 2004 with an aim to work out the chronology of the Yao, Shun, Yu periods and the Xia Dynasty, said Wang Wei, deputy director of the Archaeological Institute under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Zhengzhou, Henan Province.

Yao, Shun and Yu are three leaders who have been much praised in historical tradition. In their period disastrous floods occurred and they called on all the tribes to fight against the disasters.

In the next five years, archaeologists will study the Yangshao Culture, represented by painted pottery, in Henan Province and the civilization in the late Western Zhou Dynasty (1,100 BC-771 BC) along the Yangtze and Yellow rivers, Wang said.

The Chinese nation is one of the four ancient nations with the longest civilizations. Though boasting 5,000 years of civilization, the widely-acknowledged beginning of the civilization with historical records could be dated back to the Shang Dynasty (1,600 BC-1,100 BC) thanks to the discovery of the oracle bones.

With the inscriptions on the oracle bones, the earliest characters in China, archaeologists outlined what the society was like in the Shang Dynasty.

But there are still 1,000 years unaccounted for in China's 5,000-year civilization, making it essential for the archaeologists to find out what the pre-Shang society was like.

For the project, archaeologists designated six major relics sites, including five in relics-rich Henan Province and the other in neighboring Shanxi Province.

The five in Henan included the Neolithic Xipo Site in Lingbao County, Wangchenggang Site in Dengfeng, Xinzhai Site in Xinmi County, Erlitou Site in Yanshi County and Dashigu Site in Zhengzhou. The other was the Taosi Site in Xiangfen, a city in Shanxi.

The six sites were all large-scale towns in prehistoric China.

[blam]

I predict a natural catastrophe wiped out most of the population.

[blam]

GGG Ping.

[Tijeras_Slim]

1000 missing years. They're hidden in Helen Thomas's corset drawer.

[xcamel]

Could have been some kind of plague too.

[Roverman2K]

I also vote Plague, most if not all of the worlds pandemics have originated from china.

[Berosus]

Measles and smallpox may have come from China, but recently I learned that the first recorded outbreak of bubonic plague was at Rhapta, Tanzania (modern Zanzibar) in 536 A.D. Therefore the Black Death probably came from the same Equatorial African "hot zone" as AIDS, ebola and the Marburg virus.

Regarding China's prehistory, Chinese tradition asserts that their first fully human king, as opposed to a god or demigod, was Fu Xi, and he came across the mountains from Central Asia and settled at the junction of the Yellow and Wei Rivers in 2852 B.C. If we can trust this date, I don't think we have to do much searching for earlier eras. More likely the missing millennium is a figment of modern imagination, the result of stretching chronologies out to agree with evolutionary thought. Just ask my Freeper friend SunkenCiv; hopefully he will see this thread soon.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks Blam. I agree, a catastrophe. The interior of the country was flooded, if memory serves.

To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list. Thanks.

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[blam]

"Measles and smallpox may have come from China, but recently I learned that the first recorded outbreak of bubonic plague was at Rhapta, Tanzania (modern Zanzibar) in 536 A.D. Therefore the Black Death probably came from the same Equatorial African "hot zone" as AIDS, ebola and the Marburg virus. "

A lot was happening at that time.

The Dark Ages: Were They Darker Than We Imagined?

Most of the human affecting diseases will come from Africa, they've had millions of years there to infect humans/primates.

[Berosus]

Yes, there is a connection, date-wise. I became a believer in the sixth century A.D. catastrophe theory last spring, after reading this thread in another forum ( http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=116880 ), and checking one of my textbooks to see what the Mayans were doing at that time. It said that no records of any events were kept at the city of Tikal between 534 and 593 A.D. Since 534 is close enough to the target date of 535 for whatever happened, be it a comet collision, volcanic eruption or whatever, that was the clincher for me.

[blam]

The book Exodus To Arthur did it for me. An excellent book BTW.

I wasn't much impressed with David Keyes Book, 'Catastrophe.'

Stephen Oppenheimer has some excellent books too. He mentions in one of them that the Ice Age end may have been started by an impacting comet. Both of his books that I read are excellent.

[SunkenCiv]

Astronomy & Geophysics
Volume 45 Issue 1 Page 1.23 - February 2004
doi:10.1046/j.1468-4004.2003.45123.x
Volume 45 Issue 1

Comet impact
A comet impact in AD 536?
Emma Rigby1, Melissa Symonds2 and Derek Ward-Thompson2

Emma Rigby, Melissa Symonds and Derek Ward-Thompson review the evidence for the possibility that a comet may have impacted the Earth in historical times, and discuss the size of the putative comet.

Abstract

A global climatic downturn has previously been observed in tree-ring data associated with the years AD 536–545. We review the evidence for the explanation of this event which involves a comet fragment impacting the Earth and exploding in the upper atmosphere. The explosion would create a plume, such as was seen during the impact of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 with Jupiter. The resulting debris deposited by the plume on to the top of the atmosphere would increase the opacity and lower the temperature. We calculate the size of the comet required, and find that a relatively small fragment of only about half a kilometre in diameter could be consistent with the data. We conclude that plume formation is a by-product of small comet impacts that must be added to the list of significant global hazards posed by near-Earth objects.

Article published online 28 Jan 2004

Affiliations

1Cardiff University, UK (now at Edinburgh University, UK)2Cardiff University

The authors thank Mike Baillie, Mark Bailey, Martin Johnson, Ted Johnson-South and David Williams for interesting and helpful discussions.

To cite this article
Rigby, Emma, Symonds, Melissa & Ward-Thompson, Derek (2004)
A comet impact in AD 536?.
Astronomy & Geophysics 45 (1), 1.23-1.26.
doi: 10.1046/
j.1468-4004.2003.45123.x

Blackwell Synergy® is a Blackwell Publishing, Inc. registered trademark

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[SunkenCiv]

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