List of Neolithic cultures of China

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This is a list of Neolithic cultures of China that have been unearthed by archaeologists. They are sorted in chronological order from earliest to latest and are followed by a schematic visualization of these cultures.

It would seem that the definition of Neolithic in China is undergoing changes. The discovery in 2012 of pottery about 20,000 years BC indicates that this measure alone can no longer be used to define the period.^[1] It will fall to the more difficult task of determining when cereal domestication started.

These cultures existed during the period from 8500 to 1500 BC. Neolithic cultures remain unmarked and Bronze Age cultures (from 2000 BC) are marked with *. There are many differences in opinion on the dating for these cultures, so the dates chosen here are tentative:

For this schematic outline of its neolithic cultures China has been divided into the following nine parts:

1. Northeast China: Inner Mongolia, Heilongjiang, Jilin and Liaoning.
2. Northwest China (Upper Yellow River): Gansu, Qinghai and western part of Shaanxi.
3. North-central China (Middle Yellow River): Shanxi, Hebei, western part of Henan and eastern part of Shaanxi.
4. Eastern China (lower Yellow River): Shandong, Anhui, northern part of Jiangsu and eastern part Henan.
5. East-south-eastern China (lower Yangtze): Zhejiang and biggest part of Jiangsu.
6. South-central China (middle Yangtze): Hubei and northern part of Hunan.
7. Sichuan and upper Yangtze.
8. Southeast China: Fujian, Jiangxi, Guangdong, Guangxi, southern part of Hunan, lower Red River in the northern part of Vietnam and the island of Taiwan.
9. Southwest China: Yunnan and Guizhou.

• History of China
• List of Bronze Age sites in China
• List of Palaeolithic sites in China
• List of inventions and discoveries of Neolithic China
• Neolithic signs in China
• Prehistory of China
• Prehistoric Beifudi site
• Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors
• Xia dynasty

• Chang, Kwang-chih (1986). The archaeology of ancient China. New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-03784-8.

• Loewe, Michael; Shaughnessy, Edward L., eds. (1999). The Cambridge history of ancient China:from the origins of civilization to 221 B.C. Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-47030-7.

• He, Zhonghu; Bonjean, A.P.A. (2010). Cereals in China. International Maize and Wheat Improvement Organization (CIMMYT). ISBN 978-970-648-177-1. Retrieved 2017-07-16.

• Higham, Charles (1996). The Bronze Age of Southeast Asia. Cambridge England: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-49660-8.

• Liu, Li (2004). The Chinese neolithic:trajectories to early states. Cambridge, UK New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-81184-8.

• Liu, Li; Chen, Xingcan (eds). 2012. The archaeology of China: from the late paleolithic to the early bronze age. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-64310-8

• Underhill, Anne P (ed). 2013. A companion to Chinese archaeology. Blackwell Publishing. ISBN 978-1-4443-3529-3

• Maisels, Charles (1999). Early civilizations of the old world:the formative histories of Egypt, the Levant, Mesopotamia, India, and China. London New York: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-10976-0.

• Scarre, Christopher (2005). The human past:world prehistory & the development of human societies. New York, N.Y: Thames & Hudson. ISBN 0-500-28531-4.

chapter 7, Higham, Charles, 'East Asian Agriculture and Its Impact', p.234-264.

chapter 15, Higham, Charles, 'Complex Societies of East and Southeast Asia', p.552-594

• Media related to Neolithic cultures of China at Wikimedia Commons