Prehistoric Origins Across Eurasia

      When freezing to death, face the wind and stand straight;

      when starving to death, never bend.

      (dung si ying feng zhan, e si bu zheyao)

      —Chinese proverb

       China Before Agriculture

      China has been inhabited by humans for perhaps a million years. Here we speak, of course, of the geographical region now occupied (and overflowed) by the nation-state “China.” The region is a compact, tightly defined one, bordered by mountains and deserts, but it had no name until the Qin Dynasty unified its inner, richer districts and gave a name that slowly became fixed on the whole land. Strictly speaking, then, applying the name “China” to prehistoric central East Asia is anachronistic (Standen 2011) but has a very long history, so I follow that usage.

      During those million years, cold dry glacial periods alternated with warm wet interglacial ones. Primitive humans—Homo erectus and, later, little-known hominids similar to Neanderthals (Homo sapiens neanderthalis)—had to cope with these violent fluctuations. Their stone technology was sophisticated and diverse as early as 800,000 years ago (Gibbons 2000; Hotz 2000). Most technology then was evidently of wood or bamboo, and we have little evidence of it. They no doubt fed on anything they could find that would not poison them or outfight them. As we used to say in my youth in the rural United States, they “would eat anything that won’t eat back faster.” However, early claims of evidence for cannibalism in “Peking man” (Homo erectus pekinensis) have turned out to be wrong. The evidence for deliberate use of fire (accepted in Anderson 1988) has also been very strongly questioned by recent research (Weiner et al. 1998; Bar-Yosef and Wang 2012 provide a thorough recent review of the Chinese Paleolithic).

      Modern humans—Homo sapiens sapiens—arrived before 30,000 years ago, introducing tools that were more varied, small-sized, and sophisticated (Liu et al. 2013). By 20,000 years ago, people were hunting mammals and birds and eating fruits and seeds across what is now China, leaving many sophisticated stone points, knives, grinding slabs (metates), and other tools for us to find. Among their foods were millets (already very important), beans, gourds, and tubers (notably yams) of genera that later produced domesticated species (2013). The yams may well have been used medicinally, as they were in later times.

      Humans were also making pottery at that early date. By far the earliest pottery in the world has been found at Xianrendong Cave in Jiangxi, near the mouth of the Yangzi by Xiaohong Wu and collaborators (Shelach 2012; Xiaolong Wu et al. 2012; pottery that may be 17,000 years old has now turned up in Europe, Heritage Daily 2012). It was simple cooking ware. As the investigators point out, these findings somewhat demolish Gordon Childe’s idea of a Neolithic Revolution (Childe 1954) that gave us pottery, ground stone, and agriculture all in one swoop a few thousand years ago. Pottery came later than agriculture in the Near East, but far earlier in eastern Asia. Ground stone was earlier everywhere.

      In Japan, pottery was fairly common by 15,000–11,800 years ago and was used a great deal to make fish stews (Craig et al. 2013; it is tentatively reported by 16,000 BCE, Kuzmin 2008a). Pottery was also very early on the nearby Siberian mainland (13,000). Irina Zhuschchikhovskaya (1997; a wonderful name) found it at 11,000 BCE in the Amur Valley. By 11,300 it was well distributed across China (Jiang and Liu 2006; Kuzmin 2008a, b). It spread west through Siberia and Central Asia, reaching the Near East shortly after agriculture began, around 9000 BCE. Perhaps the Near East independently invented pottery (as the New World certainly did), but it looks to me more like a diffusion from east to west. It remains interesting that pottery came long before agriculture all over East Asia, while in West Asia and the New World, agriculture came first.

       A Bit About Physical Ancestry

      Humans are almost literally siblings beneath the epidermis. We are genetically so close that we are, in that sense, one big family.

      Until the use of genetic tests on a large scale, we really could not say much about the complex population history of Eurasia. The mix of peoples was too great. With genetics to help, things have become somewhat clearer (see, e.g., Cochran and Harpending 2009; Diamond 2005b; J. Li et al. 2008). Broadly speaking, humans came out of northeast Africa, starting perhaps 100,000 years ago, and continuing, with a great deal of back and forth movement, usually in slow trickles. The earliest ornaments and other symbolic items first appear in Africa about 70,000 years ago.

      In Eurasia, modern humans mixed with Neanderthals, so that modern Eurasians are about 2–7 percent Neanderthal (Africans mixed with their own equivalent neighbors). Also, as modern humans moved east, they encountered a mysterious, newly discovered form of human being. This form was first found as fragments in Denisova Cave, Russian Siberia, just northeast of Kazakhstan and not far from China and Mongolia (Dalton 2010; Gibbons 2011b; Krause et al. 2010; Reich et al. 2010). These are about equally distant genetically from Neanderthals and modern humans. Modern Melanesians and Aboriginal Australians are about 5 percent Denisovan, and at least some Southeast Asians show some mixing also. By normal biological rules, all these should be subspecies: modern humans being Homo sapiens sapiens, Neanderthals Homo sapiens neanderthalis, and Denisovans another subspecies not yet named. Neanderthals are usually termed a different species (H. neanderthalis), but that should be changed now that substantial mixing is recognized. In spite of mixing genetically, modern humans seem to have largely outcompeted these other types and replaced them.

      At some point in the Near East, the local population sustained a couple of mutations that dramatically lightened their skin, eyes, and hair, allowing them to get more vitamin D, which is produced in the skin under the action of UV radiation in sunlight. Tropical populations everywhere remained dark-skinned. The melanin protects from the excessive UV light in the tropics (and thus from melanoma). Also, too much vitamin D is a bad thing; it is toxic in overdose. But dark skin is a huge disadvantage in the temperate-zone winter, guaranteeing vitamin D shortage unless you are taking supplements or eating industrial quantities of fish (as did the rather dark peoples indigenous to western North America). Too little vitamin D means not only poor bone growth—rickets—but greatly increased susceptibility to multiple sclerosis and some cancers. So humans had to evolve light skin to cope with moving north. These mutations thus spread like wildfire, giving pale skin and often pale hair and eyes to people at the northwest end of the populated world. These are our modern “Europoids” or “Caucasians.” The latter term has a rather charming origin: the physical anthropologist Blumenbach used it in regard to race because he thought the point of origin of a “race” would naturally have the most beautiful people of said race, and he thought the good people of the Caucasus were the most beautiful Europoids. One wonders how he came to these conclusions. Folklore among anthropologists holds that he was working with skulls and thought they had particularly lovely skulls. But he may also have been influenced by the reputation of the living population of the Caucasus.

      Meanwhile, dark-skinned people spread through Arabia to India and onward to Southeast Asia and Oceania, where they sustained a whole range of other mutations—poorly known as of this writing. They reached Australia by 50,000–60,000 years ago. Better known is their career after they turned north in Southeast Asia (once past the Himalayan wall). Here they evolved light skin, but the mutation (one main one is known; there are evidently others to be considered) was a completely different one. It produced pale tan—“yellow”—skin instead of pale pinkish (“white”). It did not affect hair