Jiahu was the site of a Neolithic settlement based in the central plain of ancient China, near the Yellow River. It is located between the floodplains of the Ni River to the north, and the Sha River to the south, 22 km (14 mi) north of the modern city of Wuyang, Henan Province. Most archaeologists consider the site to be one of the earliest examples of the Peiligang culture. Settled around 7000 BC, the site was later flooded and abandoned around 5700 BC. The settlement was surrounded by a moat and covered a relatively large area of 55,000 square meters. At one time, it was "a complex, highly organized Chinese Neolithic society", home to at least 250 people and perhaps as many as 800.
Jiahu
Red-crowned cranes in Hokkaido, Japan. Currently an endangered species, they were plentiful throughout the East Asia region in the Neolithic period and were hunted for meat; their wing bones were used to make the Jiahu flutes.
Gudi flute found at Jiahu, on display at the Henan Museum
Proto-writing consists of visible marks communicating limited information. Such systems emerged from earlier traditions of symbol systems in the early Neolithic, as early as the 7th millennium BC in China and southeastern Europe. They used ideographic or early mnemonic symbols or both to represent a limited number of concepts, in contrast to true writing systems, which record the language of the writer.
A: samples of carved "signs" on the wooden Dispilio tablet and clay finds from Dispilio, Greece. B: samples of Linear A signs. C: samples of signs on Paleo-European clay tablets.
Image: Lascaux 04
