The origins of food production in north China: A different kind of agricultural revolution

Abstract

SUMMARYANDIMPLICATIONS The 2006 Dadiwan excavations doc-umentanarcheologicalrecordthatrunsfrom 60,000 calBP to at least 5,700calBP, with components representingnonintensive hunter-gatherers (Compo-nents 1,2, 3),intensive hunter-gatherers(Component 4), low-level DadiwanPhase farmers (Component 5), and in-tensive Late Banpo Phase millet agricul-turalists (Component 6), stratified inwhat is the first complete foraging-to-farming seq-uence for north China.Length of record aside, this agriculturaltransition is quite unlike those docu-mented in Mesoamerica 21–27 and theNear East, 15–19 where the forager-farmer transition proved easier to dem-onstrate because prefarming groups lefta much richer archeological record of amuch slower transition. Dadiwan’s pre-farming groups were small, highly mo-bilebandsofhuntersthathadsplinteredfrom the main body of the North ChinaMicrolithic in the upper Yellow Riverdeserts and worked their way south intothe more heavily vegetated and topo-graphically complex western Loess Pla-teau.Here,huntingdogsandsubstantialBox2.StableIsotopes