The transition from foraging to farming in China

Lu, Tracey L-D

doi:10.7152/bippa.v18i0.11700

Cited by 26 publications

(34 citation statements)

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“…Farmers have been cultivating paddy rice (Oryza sativa L.) on China's east coast for approximately seven millennia (18). Rice is the predominant dietary staple in southeast Asia with China being the world's foremost producer, accounting for over one-third of global supply.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

High Percentage Inorganic Arsenic Content of Mining Impacted and Nonimpacted Chinese Rice

Zhu

Sun

Lei

et al. 2008

Environ. Sci. Technol.

404

229

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Two approaches were undertaken to characterize the arsenic (As) content of Chinese rice. First, a national market basket survey (n ) 240) was conducted in provincial capitals, sourcing grain from China's premier rice production areas. Second, to reflect rural diets, paddy rice (n ) 195) directly from farmers fields were collected from three regions in Hunan, a key rice producing province located in southern China. Two of the sites were within mining and smeltery districts, and the third was devoid of large-scale metal processing industries. Arsenic levels were determined in all the samples while a subset (n ) 33) were characterized for As species, using a new simple and rapid extraction method suitable for use with Hamilton PRP-X100 anion exchange columns and HPLC-ICP-MS. The vast majority (85%) of the market rice grains possessed total As levels < 150 ng g -1 . The rice collected from mine-impacted regions, however, were found to be highly enriched in As, reaching concentrations of up to 624 ng g -1 . Inorganic As (As i ) was the predominant species detected in all of the speciated grain, with As i levels in some samples exceeding 300 ng g -1 . The As i concentration in polished and unpolished Chinese rice was successfully predicted from total As levels. The mean baseline concentrations for As i in Chinese market rice based on this survey were estimated to be 96 ng g -1 while levels in mine-impacted areas were higher with ca. 50% of the rice in one region predicted to fail the national standard.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

High Percentage Inorganic Arsenic Content of Mining Impacted and Nonimpacted Chinese Rice

Zhu

Sun

Lei

et al. 2008

Environ. Sci. Technol.

404

229

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“…Chang's (1986) final treatment of ancient China appeared. Since then, one of the most significant published contributions available to western scholars has been the synthetic treatment of hunter-gatherer and early agricultural sites, assemblages and radiocarbon dates compiled by Lu (1999). Her work underscored the importance of bridging the temporal gap that has long frustrated attempts to establish a convincing link between the youngest known Late Pleistocene Paleolithic assemblages and the oldest known Middle Neolithic examples of early millet agriculture, traditionally divided into three geographical complexes: Peiligang, Cishan and Dadiwan Fig.…”

Section: Late Pleistocene -Early Holocene Prehistory Of North Chinamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…1) and commented upon by Lu (1999): the interval 10.0-8.0 ka is remarkably under-represented and the ''Early Neolithic'' of north China's culture history essentially non-existent. Radiocarbon data are somewhat deceiving in this sense: of the 118 reliable dates we have been able to assemble for all of north China that fall between 14.0 and 6.0 ka, no fewer than 11 (9.3%) are between 10.0 and 8.0 ka.…”

Section: The Gap In the Recordmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…), sitting on the middle reach of the Yellow River. Together with Houli, they are often seen as being connected to Late Pleistocene lithic assemblages 200-300 km to the east (e.g., Xiachuan and Xueguan; Chen, 1984;Chen and Olsen, 1990;Lu 1999) or Early Holocene sites 300-500 km to the north (e.g., Nanzhuangtou; Guo and Li, 2002). Noting the co-occurrence of millet and rice remains at Jiahu, a site belonging to the Peiligang cultural horizon, some authors propose that millet domestication is an outgrowth of earlier, rice-centered agricultural systems that originate well south of the Yellow River drainage (Cohen, 2002;Bellwood, 2005).…”

Section: Late Pleistocene -Early Holocene Prehistory Of North Chinamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The material evidence used to justify the ''agricultural'' classification of specific sites varies widely. In some cases, the designation is based on the presence of domesticated plant or animal taxa; in others, it is based simply on the presence of ceramics or architectural features that resemble those found at sites with known domesticates (see Lu, 1999). Recent efforts have focused on establishing the degree of agricultural subsistence in Middle and Late Neolithic China on the basis of stable isotope chemistry Pechenkina et al, 2005) and skeletal biometry and paleopathology (Jackes and Gao, 1994;Smith, 2005).…”

Section: Late Pleistocene -Early Holocene Prehistory Of North Chinamentioning

confidence: 99%

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The transition to agriculture in northwestern China

Bettinger¹,

Barton²,

Richerson³

et al. 2007

Developments in Quaternary Sciences

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Agriculture can evolve independently only where intensive hunter-gatherer plant use has previously evolved, and both developments are limited by two major evolutionary constraints: climatic variability and social convention. During the Pleistocene, environmental variability constrained plant productivity and therefore plant-intensive subsistence; but during the Holocene it was the hunter-gatherer social conventions that constrained the evolution of plant-based agricultural subsistence. Specifically, in places with continuous huntergatherer occupation (i.e., the Near East), social conventions prohibiting the ownership of land curtailed intensification and prolonged the transition to agriculture. In contrast, northwest China was virtually uninhabited during the Early Holocene. Here, new social orders favoring the ownership of land were free to emerge without restriction, so the transition to agriculture was rapid. Semi-permanent settlements and domesticated broomcorn millet emerged abruptly in the western Loess Plateau at Dadiwan by 7.0 ka with no local hunter-gatherer ancestry. We propose that the intensive plant specialization required for domestication and incipient agriculture emerged first in the desert margins north of the Yellow River and migrated southwards to the more humid and fertile floodplains of the Loess Plateau west of the Liu Pan Mountains, perhaps in response to increasing aridity and climatic instability during the Early Holocene.

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