"Eating" is one of the most vital themes of Chinese culture. Wang Renxiang, the author of "Food and Chinese Culture", intervened in the development of diet as an archaeologist, and included "eating" into the category of social thematic history. Eating utensils, cooking methods, and dietary anecdotes are described in detail, and their origins are examined one by one, and the breadth and depth of Chinese culture are reproduced from the "diet".
The early history of human beings is a history with the development of food resources as its main content.
It is in this process that human beings have formed a certain social structure, which has promoted the development of society and created a long-standing prehistoric culture.
It is the instinct of animals to find food. It is in the long years of searching for food that humans gradually separated from the animal kingdom and became human.
Due to changes in climate and environment, apes that lived in groups in the jungle changed to living on the ground. In the process of searching for food, simple labor behaviors appeared, which led to the differentiation of forelimbs into arms and hindlimbs into legs and feet, and finally stood up and walked upright.
After this walk, he walked out of the ape group and became a man of the sky.
People who walk upright have a greatly expanded field of vision and gradually develop their brains.
Early Homo erectus was able to make simple stone tools, and late Homo erectus started to use fire.
Going forward, we reached the early stage of Homo sapiens, where artificial fire-making technology was invented.
By the late Homo sapiens stage, they had mastered the skills of carving and painting, and began to make ornaments, which was the late Paleolithic period as defined by archaeologists.
Paleoanthropic fossils and their cultural relics discovered in China are quite rich. Some important discoveries have been made in Beijing, Yunnan, Sichuan, Shaanxi, Shanxi, Henan, Hubei, Anhui, Guangdong, Guangxi, Inner Mongolia and Liaoning. The most famous ones are Fossils belonging to the early Homo erectus Yuanmou man, the late Homo erectus Lantian and Beijing man, the early Homo sapiens Dingcun man, and the late Homo sapiens cave man.
These ancient humans lived in the era of more than one million to 10,000 years ago, and they were groups of hungry hunters from generation to generation.
In order to maintain their own survival, ancient humans had to fight against many animals that were far beyond their size and strength. Huge rhinos, ferocious saber-toothed tigers, and brutal hyenas were all once in the belly of human beings.
Other docile and weak animals, as well as the swimming fish, shrimp and mussels in the rivers and lakes, cannot escape the search of these primitive hunters and fishermen.
In addition to animals, the more reliable food sources for ancient humans were plants, which were all kinds of fruits and vegetables that grew on branches, vines and buried in the soil.
When even these fruits and vegetables could not be found, humans involuntarily turned their attention to plant stems, flowers and leaves, and chose to taste those things that suit their appetite.
I don’t know how many generations of attempts and how many lives have been paid to screen out edible plants.
About 10,000 years ago, with the emergence of agriculture and the emergence of pottery, human society entered what archaeologists call the Neolithic Age.
Several important cultural achievements of the Neolithic Age, including farming, animal husbandry, and pottery making, revolved around the production of food.
There are thousands of Neolithic sites found on the land of China, scattered everywhere, among which the two banks of the Yellow River are the most densely distributed.
In the loess belt and the loess alluvial belt, in the early Neolithic Age, 10,000 to 8,000 years ago, there were already some primitive farming tribes, creating a millet farming civilization.
These farming tribes depended on the loess and the Yellow River for their survival, and the cultures they created were named by archaeologists as Baijiacun Culture, Cishan Culture, Peiligang Culture and Beixin Culture.
The well-known Yangshao culture and Dawenkou culture developed on the basis of these early cultures, and the main means of production is still millet cultivation.
Like the Yellow River, the Yangtze River is the father and mother who raised the prehistoric Chinese residents and the cradle of Chinese prehistoric culture.
The development history of the Yangtze River Basin is as old as the Yellow River Basin. Nearly 10,000 years ago, there was also a primitive farming culture here. The difference is that it is not dry farming as in the north, and its main crop is rice.
The representative farming cultures in the Yangtze River Basin include Pengtoushan Culture, Hemudu Culture, Majiabang Culture and Daxi Culture.
There are also many Neolithic tribes active on the southeastern coast, the southwestern plateau and the northern grasslands. They either engaged in farming, or engaged in nomadic herding, fishing and hunting, and decided how to obtain food according to the characteristics of the natural and geographical environment.
The emergence of farming on the earth is called by scholars the "Green Revolution" or "Neolithic Revolution". The purpose of this revolution is to solve the problem of hunger and seek new and more stable sources of food.
In the Paleolithic Age, whether gathering, fishing or hunting, food was obtained by asking nature.
As the environment changes and the population increases, this method of obtaining has become less and less able to ensure a stable source of life, so new seeking begins in this sense of urgency.
According to research, the birth of agricultural planting may be attributed to women.
In the process of collecting plant seeds, they may be the first to recognize the law of natural growth, and finally succeed in repeated planting from unintentional to intentional.
The era of farming has come, and women have not only created new vitality for human beings, but also pushed human society into a new era of development.
The reclamation method of primitive agriculture has experienced the process of developing from fire tillage to hoe tillage. Hoe tillage appeared in the later stage of the early Neolithic Age, and at least 8,000 years ago in China.
At this time, the farming activities have already been on a large scale, better cultivated species have been cultivated, the harvest volume can generally meet the needs of life, and there is a certain grain reserve.
According to the existing archaeological data, the emergence of primitive agriculture in China was about 10,000 years ago, and the earliest successful cultivation of cereals was mainly millet, millet and rice.
In the warm and humid southern region, many relics of prehistoric rice crops have been found, and the earliest ones have a history of more than 9,000 years.
Around 7,000 years ago, rice cultivation in the Yangtze River Basin was relatively common, and two varieties of japonica and indica have been successfully cultivated.
These findings confirm that southern China is one of the origins of rice, and the earliest remains of rice crops found abroad are only about 6,000 years ago.
In the vast arid area of the Yellow River Basin, the remains of cultivated millet have been found in the early Neolithic site, which are more than 9,000 years old and are the earliest remains of cultivated millet in the world, indicating that the north is the origin of millet.
In the north, millet is the same ancient cultivated crop as millet, and its planting scale and yield may not be as large as millet.
The cultivated grains of the Neolithic period in China were also wheat and sorghum.
Past research believed that wheat was first successfully cultivated in West Asia and was introduced to China in the early years of the Western Han Dynasty; sorghum was a crop in equatorial Africa and was not introduced to China until the third or fourth century AD.
However, at the Neolithic sites in western China, remains of wheat and sorghum have been found at the same time, no later than 5,000 years ago.
The latest estimate is that Chinese wheat may have been successfully domesticated in the western plateau at the earliest, and it was introduced to the Yellow River basin at least 5,000 years ago, but the cultivation is not very common.
Wheat planting in the Yellow River Basin was early and uncommon, which may be limited by the way of eating.
China has a tradition of eating grains since ancient times. The taste of wheat grains is not good and cannot catch up with millet, so people use millet as the main crop.
Sorghum also originated independently in China. The origin is the arid Loess Plateau, which has nothing to do with African sorghum.
In ancient China, cultivated grains were collectively referred to as "five grains" or "hundred grains", mainly including grain (millet), millet, wheat, shu (bean), hemp, rice, etc. Except for wheat and hemp, all of which have been cultivated for more than 7,000 years. Cultivation history.
The occurrence and development of primitive agriculture has fundamentally changed the way humans obtain food, from seeking to creating, and changing from the cultivation of mountains, forests, lakes and seas to the cultivation of loess and rivers, and the food life has a new content.
The development of primitive farming also gave birth to another auxiliary food production sector-livestock breeding.
The earliest successful domestication of domestic animals is the dog, which was domesticated from the wolf.
Dog remains have been unearthed in most Neolithic sites in China, some as early as 8,000 years ago.
The most important livestock of the farming tribes is the pig, and the domestication was successful at the same time as the domestic dog.
Pig bones, sometimes even a whole pig, have been found in Neolithic burials at many sites in China, indicating that pig rearing was widespread.
Pigs and dogs were raised in the Neolithic North and South, along with chickens in the North and buffaloes in the South.
In the late Neolithic period, domestic horses, domestic cats, domestic goats and sheep were successfully domesticated.
That is to say, the "six animals" of traditional Chinese livestock, namely horses, cattle, sheep, chickens, dogs, and hogs, were successfully domesticated in the Neolithic Age. formed.
Wang Renxiang
Qilu Evening News