Posted on 08/07/2004 11:17:13 AM PDT by blam
Ancient pottery with plowing design unearthed
www.chinaview.cn 2004-08-07 10:57:27
LANZHOU, Aug. 7 (Xinhuanet) -- A 4,800-year-old piece of colored pottery bearing designs of plowing was recently unearthed at Lintao County in northwest China's Gansu Province.
Chinese archaeologists believe the pottery, which is 30-cm-talland 34-cm in width, belongs to the Majiayao culture, a historical period in about 3300 B.C. to 2050 B.C..
The picture on the pottery vividly portrays a scene of plowing in simple black lines. Beside the farmland is a river, painted in several zigzag lines.
Wang Zhi'an, president of the Gansu Provincial Majiayao Culture Society, said the design reflects the production and life of people in that period. It is rare in China to discover a picture depicting men plowing in fields.
Discovery of the cultivation design suggests that agricultural civilization was present in China as long as 4,800 years ago.
The design also proved that figure painting in the country can be traced back to 4,800 years ago. Enditem
GGG Ping.
When would that origin have been? 2800 BC seems late.
"Some people believe this is the area where all Indo-Europeans originated"
I've read this too. I think you're right.
LOL. . .! Funny stuff, but with more truth than not, I am inclined to believe. As they say, whatever 'goes around, comes around.'
As I recall, wheat and millet were both grown in the region. However, I don't recall any dates for the wheat. Also, irrigation was an early intoduction there and to the west.
Don't know. In 2,800BC they were still there, the dispersal obviously would have begun earlier than that date. The first Asian skeletons only began to show up in the area in about 100BC.
I will quote from The Tarim Mummies by JP Malloy And Victor Mair:
"Narain argues that once one accepts the equation Tocharain = Yuezhi, then one is forced to follow both the Chinese historical sources and the geographical reference of their first cited historical location (Gansu) to the conclusion that they have lived there 'from times 'immemorial'. Narain infers that they had been there at least since the Qijia Culture c.2000BC and probably even earlier in the Yangshao culture of the neolithic. This would render the Tocharians as virtually native to Gansu (and earlier that the putative spread of the Neolithic to Xinjiang) and Narin goes so far as to argue that the Indo-Europeans themselves originally dispersed from this area westwards."
The extinct Tocharian (Indo-European) language is most closely related to ancient Celtic.
Yup. The whole area was much wetter then. The rivers were flowing with water from glacial melt that had accumulated for 100k years. Once all the glaciers melted, the region dried to a crisp.
People once (as recently as early in the twentieth century) widely believed that "rain follows the plow," that human agriculture tended cause more rain in dry regions. I've lately noticed that, as part of the tendency to blame humans for all evil and all change, the more fashionable current variation is that "desert follows the plow." That is, in places like the Sahel of Africa and other regions once blooming but now dry, humans have caused something called "desertification" which otherwise would not happen.
Well, here and there humans do reroute the water from point A to point B, such as in the Aral Sea basin, changing things at least for a time. Also, humans are pumping up water from the Oglala undergound reservoir to (for time, until the finite supply of water runs out) make western Kansas, Nebraska, and Oklahoma more fertile than they used to be. But I suspect that the net influence of humans on this kind of thing has not been large or permanent.
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I've lately noticed that, as part of the tendency to blame humans for all evil and all change, the more fashionable current variation is that "desert follows the plow." That is, in places like the Sahel of Africa and other regions once blooming but now dry, humans have caused something called "desertification" which otherwise would not happen... But I suspect that the net influence of humans on this kind of thing has not been large or permanent.Wholeheartedly agree.
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