Millet arrived in the South China Coast around 5,500 years ago

<p>Crop dispersal has long been recognised as an important topic in agricultural archaeology and food globalisation. One of most pressing questions facing archaeologists is determining when and where millet arrived in the South China Coast. Our study focused on the millet phytoliths remains from three Neolithic sites in southeast coastal Fujian. Multiple dating methods, including charred carbon dating, phytolith carbon dating, and optically stimulated luminescence were used to construct the chronologies of the sites. The dating results showed that BTS was initially occupied at approximately 5,500 cal a BP. The millet phytoliths recovered in this study are likely the earliest millet remains found in Fujian, suggesting that millet arrived in the South China Coast at least 5,500 years ago. However, questions about whether millet agriculture in northern China dispersed southward through the inland or coastal routes remain unanswered. Given that millet remains were found in Jiangxi and northern Fujian – two important gaps in the inland route – no earlier than 5,000 cal a BP, it seems that the millet remains recovered from the coastal sites of Fujian might have dispersed following a coastal route from northern China. Nevertheless, Fujian is an important junction of the coastal route for the dispersal of millet from northern China. These findings not only provide new insights to millet dispersal routes in China, but also have significant implications for crop communications between Taiwan and mainland China during the Neolithic age.</p><p> </p><p> </p>

The homelands of the individual Transeurasian proto-languages

This chapter is an attempt to identify the individual homelands of the five families making up the Transeurasian grouping, i.e. the Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, Koreanic, and Japonic families. Combining various linguistic methods and principles such as the diversity hotspot principle, Bayesian phylolinguistics, cultural reconstruction (“linguistic paleontology”), and prehistoric contact linguistics, the chapter aims to determine the original locations and time depths of the families under discussion. Integrating an archeological perspective, we further propose that the individual speech communities were originally familiar with millet agriculture, while terms for pastoralism or wet-rice agriculture entered their vocabularies only at a later stage in history.

Austronesian influence and Transeurasian ancestry in Japanese

In this paper, I propose a hypothesis reconciling Austronesian influence and Transeurasian ancestry in the Japanese language, explaining the spread of the Japanic languages through farming dispersal. To this end, I identify the original speech community of the Transeurasian language family as the Neolithic Xinglongwa culture situated in the West Liao River Basin in the sixth millennium BC. I argue that the separation of the Japanic branch from the other Transeurasian languages and its spread to the Japanese Islands can be understood as occurring in connection with the dispersal of millet agriculture and its subsequent integration with rice agriculture. I further suggest that a prehistorical layer of borrowings related to rice agriculture entered Japanic from a sister language of proto-Austronesian, at a time when both language families were still situated in the Shandong-Liaodong interaction sphere.

Site of Baodun yields earliest evidence for the spread of rice and foxtail millet agriculture to south-west China

The Chengdu plain of south-west China lies outside the main centres of early domestication in the Huanghe and Yangzi valleys, but its importance in Chinese prehistory is demonstrated by the spectacular Sanxingdui bronzes of the second millennium BC and by the number of walled enclosures of the third millennium BC associated with the Baodun culture. The latter illustrate the development of social complexity. Paradoxically, however, these are not the outcome of a long settled agricultural history but appear to be associated with the movement of the first farming communities into this region. Recent excavations at the Baodun type site have recovered plant remains indicating not only the importance of rice cultivation, but also the role played by millet in the economy of these and other sites in south-west China. Rice cultivation in paddy fields was supplemented by millet cultivation in neighbouring uplands. Together they illustrate how farmers moving into this area from the Middle Yangzi adjusted their cultivation practices to adapt to their newly colonised territories.