Page 23 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

Every lover of Chinese art today is familiar with the magnificent CHINA IN THE
painted pottery of the Neolithic period, but it was not until 1921 STONE AGE
that positive evidence was found that China had actually passed
through a Stone Age at all. In that year the Swedish geologist J.
Gunnar Andersson and his Chinese assistants made two discover-
ies of immense importance. The first was at Chou-k'ou-tien,
southwest of Peking, where deep in a cleft in the hillside Anders-
son picked up a number of flint tools, indicating that it had been
occupied by very early man. He himself did not excavate, but his
find led to further excavations and to the eventual discovery by Dr.
P'ei Wen-chung of fossil bones which, with the exception of late
Java man, Pithecanthropus (rectus, were the oldest human remains
yet discovered. The bones were those of a hominid, Sinanthropus
pekinensis, who lived in the middle Pleistocene period, about half
a million years ago. The remains in the deep cleft, fifty metres
thick, represent many thousands of years of occupation. Peking
man had tools of quartz, flint, and limestone, made either from
pebbles chipped to shape or from flakes struck off a large pebble.
He was a cannibal who broke open the bones of his victims to suck
out the marrow; he had fire, ate grain, and probably knew some
very primitive form of speech. In 1964, in deposits on an open
hillside in Lan-t'ien County, Shensi, palaeontologists discovered
the cranium of a hominid believed, from related fossil remains, to
be at least 100,000 years older than Peking man, and so roughly the
same age as early Java man, Pithecanthropus robustus. Far older still
are the fossil teeth of an ape-man discovered in 1965 in the Yuan-
mou district in Yunnan dated by palaeomagnetism to 1.7 million
years ago. The search for early man in China goes on.
Gradually, in the late Pleistocene, the evolution of early man in
China gathered pace. In recent years, remains of Homo sapiens
have been found in many areas. "Upper Cave Man" at Chou-
k'ou-tien (c. 25,000 B.C.) had a wider range of stone tools than his
ancestors, he probably wore hides sewn together, and his wife
adorned herself with stone beads drilled and painted with hema-
tite, the earliest known intentional decoration in the history of
Chinese civilisation. Finely fashioned microliths (very small stone
implements) have been found in many desert sites in Ning-hsia
and the Ordos region, different types of blades and flakes being
fashioned for different purposes. Further south, in the region of
northern Honan that was to become the last seat of the Shang Dy-
nasty, thousands of microliths were discovered in a habitation site
in 1 960; other rich remains have been found far to the southwest,
in Szechwan, Yunnan, and Kweichow. Although as yet the dating
of these scattered sites and their relationship to each other arc by
no means clear, their distribution suggests that the Upper Palaeo-
lithic culture, shading imperceptibly into the Mesolithic, was
spread very widely across ancient China.
The people of the Mesolithic era were hunters and fishermen. The NEOLITHIC CULTURE
"Neolithic Revolution" took place when the ancestors of the
Chinese race settled down, began to build villages and to learn the
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