Page 194 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

The Wide View (I)
descendants of the herdsmen who remained in their homeland

now begin to grow wheat and millet on the plains by the rivers,
and bury their dead in chambers cut into the barrows of their
ancestors of three hundred fifty years ago.
Not far to the north, where the great Siberian forests begin,
agriculture and even stock raising cease. In the forest still live
the trappers and the hunters of deer and wild forest oxen, wan­

dering their range from the settled areas of the plains as far as
the polar tundra facing the Arctic Ocean. And on the arctic
coasts live the hunters of seals and walrus and reindeer, with
their skin boats and bone harpoons. They are the descendants of

the people we met in these regions three hundred fifty years ago,
removed by just as many generations as have succeeded each
other in the lands of the south. But their lives are the same as
they have been for these many years, and they are to be the same
for their descendants for millennia to come.
Beyond the mountains of the Tien Shan and the sparse

grasslands of the Gobi and the Taklamakan, the agricultural com­
munities along the Yellow River are becoming an organized civili­
zation under a centralized rule. From the province of Shantung,
the coastal region around the estuary of the Yellow River, a new

people has in these centuries been spreading westward along
the river valley. Like the people they conquer, they are village
farmers, users of stone tools. In the archaeological record the
change is shown merely by the appearance of fine black bur­
nished pottery and by the introduction of sheep and the horse

to the area formerly inhabited by keepers of pigs and cattle. It is
possible that we should see in this change of “cultures” the rise
of the first of the legendary dynasties of China, that of the Hsia
emperors.

As in the Old World, so in the New these three hundred fifty
years have been full of births and deaths, battles and movements
of peoples. But we have no records to tell of them, nor has
archaeology yet been able to provide a sharp enough chronology
for wars and kingdoms and hunting ranges to be identified. On

the surface, America was unchanged since 2000 b.c., with its
arctic-coast fishers and its forest and plains hunters. And on the