However, other ancient civilizations, like those of Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley remain peripheral to our knowledge of the period and the history of ancient China is a closed book for many of us. The new findings below may help us get a clearer picture, while also setting the record straight on how civilization began there.
Until now, the Xia Dynasty has been considered to be the beginning of ancient Chinese culture situated in the central region of the country near the Yellow River. It flourished around 2,000 BC. However, Mail Online is reporting that a far older civilization existed in the north-east of the country some 2,400 years earlier.
It was called the Hongshan culture and it has not been studied in detail before, because it was thought to be a small, isolated community with little influence on China’s historical development.
New findings published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, however, seriously challenge this notion. The New Historian says “as the Hongshan existed so early, it could reveal that the root of Chinese civilisation is thousands of years older than previously thought” and could have evolved in the north and then spread south towards the central region.
Study co-author, Louis Scuderi, from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque said that, “We seem to see evidence that Hongshan was far more important to early Chinese culture than it’s currently given credit for.”
So the researchers from the Institute of Geochemistry Chinese Academy of Sciences decided to explore whether the Hongshan culture’s position and influence was more widely spread than previously thought, when it was at its height in 4,400 BC.
The culture is already well-known for its carved artifacts, jade dragons and clay figurines and the Hongshan may, in fact, be responsible for the first pieces of art to represent the figure of the sacred dragon in Chinese society.
The archaeologists studied sediment and desert lands in Hunshandake in Inner Mongolia about 185 miles (300 kilometres) away from the central Hongshan areas. Large amounts of pottery and other items were found there suggesting that many Hongshan people had lived in the area and confirming the hypothesis that the Hongshan culture was far more widespread than previously thought.
“Our research on the interactions in the Hunshandake suggests Chinese civilisation may be rooted in the marginal areas in the north, rather than in the middle reaches of the Yellow River,” a spokesperson said.
The archaeologists discovered that between 5,000 and 9,000 years ago, the surroundings had been dominated by waterways of rivers and lakes, lined with birch and spruce trees.
It would have been an excellent environment for the Hongshan people to develop their culture.
“We’re amazed by how much water there was back then,” said Scuderi. “There were very, very large lakes, and grasslands and forests. And based on all the artifacts we’ve found out there, there was clearly a very large population along the lake shores.”
However, around 4,200 years ago the environment completely changed to more arid and sandy conditions and the researchers theorize that it was this process of desertification, which could have forced the Hongshan southwards, where they then played a key role in the development of Chinese civilization as a whole.
