I
n the 1920s, at a village called Zhoukoudian, twenty-seven miles
southwest of Beijing, a team of Chinese and Swedish archeologists
ignored the occasional gunfi re of warlord armies competing for con-
trol of north China and patiently excavated a cave at a place the peas-
ants called “Chicken Bone Hill” because of the many small bones in the
hill’s red clay soil. Their work was amply rewarded with one of the rich-
est discoveries (beginning with a single tooth in 1921) of the remains
of one of our earliest human ancestors, known to the world as Peking
Man. These early human ancestors occupied the cave at Zhoukoudian
from roughly 400,000 years ago up until 200,000 years ago. About fi ve
feet tall, Peking Man (and Woman) hunted and cooked wild animals,
used sharpened stone tools, and had a brain capacity about halfway
between that of great apes and modern human beings. Peking Man’s
primitive existence, half a million years ago, is a vivid reminder to us
that human civilization has taken a very long time to develop.
Somewhere between 10,000 and 8,000 years ago, people in what
today is north and central China began to develop settled agriculture,
paralleling similar developments in Mesopotamia and parts of Africa
and South America. Through domesticating animals and growing their
own food, especially millet (a dry land cereal grain) in the middle Yel-
low River valley of the north and rice (which requires wet fi elds) in the
Yangzi River valley to the south, people began to evolve more populous
and complex societies. The climate during this era was warmer and
moister than it is today, which no doubt contributed in helping people
fi rst discover the miracle of growing their own food.
By 5000 to 4000 bce, a number of Neolithic settlements were scat-
tered throughout what we call China today. Two of the best documented
of these, from around 3000 bce, are known as the Yangshao, or painted
pottery culture, in the northwest and the Longshan, or black pottery
culture, which developed at about the same time and extended from the
chapter 1