Stone Age China
The first people (leaving out Neanderthal-type pre-humans) seem to have reached China about 50,000 BC. This is about the same time as the first people in Europe. These people lived in caves, made fires, used stone and bone tools, and wore fur and leather clothes. They were hunters and gatherers.
But big changes happened around 4000-3000 BC, in the Neolithic or New Stone Age, when people began farming rice and keeping animals (like sheep and chickens) in China. West Asian people had already been farming for about three thousand years, but we don't know whether people in China learned how to farm from the West Asians or began doing it on their own. Probably they began on their own, just as a natural response to being more crowded and needing to produce more food on their land, or because of climate changes. As in Egypt and West Asia, the first place where people began settling down in cities was in a river valley, along the Yellow River in northern China.
Once people living in China began farming, they also
began to live in villages and build small houses
with reed roofs. Around 3000-2000 BC, they
also began to make pottery.
Again, this is later than in West Asia, but that doesn't mean that the
Chinese learned how from the West Asians. We know about two kinds of
Chinese pottery from this time:
Red clay pots with swirling black designs from north-west China, and
Smooth black pots from north-east China.
About this time people in China also began to use silk to make clothes, and to use wagons with wheels. Probably, like the Sumerians, they learned about carts with wheels from people in Central Asia who had been using wheeled carts since about 3700 BC.
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To find out more about Stone Age China, check out these books from Amazon.com or from your library:
Eyewitness: Ancient China, by Arthur Cotterell, Alan Hills, and Geoff Brightling (2000). For kids.
China (History of Nations), by Greenhaven Press (2002). For middle schoolers. The negative review on Amazon is actually for a different book - don't be alarmed!
The Chinese Neolithic: Trajectories to Early States (New Studies in Archaeology), by Li Liu. Edited by Colin Renfrew and others (2004).
