The Dadiwan culture (c. 7900–7200 BP) was a

Neolithic The Neolithic period, or New Stone Age, is an Old World archaeological period and the final division of the Stone Age. It saw the Neolithic Revolution, a wide-ranging set of developments that appear to have arisen independently in several pa ...

culture located primarily in the eastern portion of

Gansu Gansu (, ; alternately romanized as Kansu) is a province in Northwest China. Its capital and largest city is Lanzhou, in the southeast part of the province. The seventh-largest administrative district by area at , Gansu lies between the Tibe ...

and

Shaanxi Shaanxi (alternatively Shensi, see § Name) is a landlocked province of China. Officially part of Northwest China, it borders the province-level divisions of Shanxi (NE, E), Henan (E), Hubei (SE), Chongqing (S), Sichuan (SW), Gansu (W), N ...

provinces in modern

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's List of countries and dependencies by population, most populous country, with a Population of China, population exceeding 1.4 billion, slig ...

. The culture takes its name from the deepest cultural layer found during the original excavation of the type site at Dadiwan. The remains of

millet Millets () are a highly varied group of small-seeded grasses, widely grown around the world as cereal crops or grains for fodder and human food. Most species generally referred to as millets belong to the tribe Paniceae, but some millets a ...

, pigs and

dogs The dog (''Canis familiaris'' or ''Canis lupus familiaris'') is a domesticated descendant of the wolf. Also called the domestic dog, it is derived from the extinct Pleistocene wolf, and the modern wolf is the dog's nearest living relative. ...

have been found in sites associated with the culture, which is itself defined by a thin-walled, cord-marked ceramic tradition sometimes referred to as Laoguantai. The Dadiwan culture shares a variety of common features, in pottery, architecture, and economy, with the Cishan and

Peiligang culture The Peiligang culture was a Neolithic culture in the Yi-Luo river basin (in modern Henan Province, China) that existed from 7000 to 5000 BC. Over 100 sites have been identified with the Peiligang culture, nearly all of them in a fairly comp ...

s to the east. The Dadiwan

type site In archaeology, a type site is the site used to define a particular archaeological culture or other typological unit, which is often named after it. For example, discoveries at La Tène and Hallstatt led scholars to divide the European Iron A ...

in Qin'an County,

sits atop a fan toe produced by a gully that drains into the Qingshui River valley, itself a tributary of the Wei River. The site was originally excavated from 1975 to 1984, and again in 2004, 2006, and 2009. The most recent excavations reveal that humans had occupied the location sporadically for at least the last 60,000 years. The Neolithic cultural sequence here begins with the Dadiwan culture (c. 7900–7200 BP), followed by the

Yangshao culture The Yangshao culture (仰韶文化, pinyin: Yǎngsháo wénhuà) was a Neolithic culture that existed extensively along the middle reaches of the Yellow River in China from around 5000 BC to 3000 BC. The culture is named after the Yangsh ...

(c. 6800–4900 BP) and then the Changshan culture (c. 4900–4800 BP). The agricultural economy intensified and flourished during the early phases of the Yangshao culture. The foundation of a large building, measuring when including the outer courtyard, was discovered at Dadiwan. The building, known as F901, is described by Chinese archaeologists as a communal meeting hall. The building was built on an elevated rammed earth foundation, which was then layered with burnt clay. The site has continued to produce new information about the Dadiwan culture. For example, biogeochemical analyses reported in 2013 reveal that dogs living at Dadiwan from 7900–4900 calBP likely consumed

C4 carbon fixation carbon fixation or the Hatch–Slack pathway is one of three known photosynthetic processes of carbon fixation in plants. It owes the names to the 1960's discovery by Marshall Davidson Hatch and Charles Roger Slack that some plants, when sup ...

plants throughout the year. Because all other wild animals (like deer and bear) found at the site only consumed C3 plants, it suggests that the natural year-round vegetation was dominated by C3 plants. The only way that dog bones would contain strong C4 signals was if they consumed a rare plant year-round. A likely candidate for this is millet (a C4 grass); and because millet only grows in the summer, the only way that dogs could eat it year round is if humans were feeding it to them. Therefore, this represents some of the earliest evidence for agricultural production (cultivation, harvesting, and storing of seed crops) in East Asia.

References

* Allan, Sarah (ed), ''The Formation of Chinese Civilization: An Archaeological Perspective'', {{coord, 35.011331, 105.909813, region:CN-62_type:city_source:kolossus-dewiki, display=title Neolithic cultures of China History of Gansu History of Shaanxi 6th-millennium BC establishments sv:Kinas förhistoria#Neolitisk tid

See also

References