China News Agency, Beijing, July 15th, title: Pursuing the historical facts of ancient human culture in the East: Where is the direction?
The author Zhou Yuduan is an associate professor at the Department of Archaeology, School of History, Wuhan University, and an associate professor at the Yangtze River Civilization Archaeology Research Institute, Wuhan University.
The famous archaeologist Mr. Su Bingqi once pointed out that "the cultural roots of more than one million years and the beginning of civilization of tens of thousands of years" are the basic national conditions of China.
Pursuing the historical facts of ancient human culture in the East is a major mission of Chinese Paleolithic archaeology, which requires us to clarify the direction of exploration from a global and historical perspective.
Is the difference between Eastern and Western cultures in the Paleolithic period a fact?
In 1948, HL Movius, an archaeologist at Harvard University, demonstrated in his article "Early Paleolithic in East and South Asia" that in the early and middle Paleolithic, eastern and southern Asia, Western Europe, Africa and other places belonged to Two distinct cultural areas: the West is an "advanced cultural circle" represented by sophisticated hand axes and prefabricated stone core technology, while the East is a "culturally lagging fringe region" represented by simple hacking and flake tools .
This statement contains strong Eurocentric thinking, and has been criticized by many.
Morwes himself quickly realized the inappropriateness of this value judgment, and then only emphasized the differences between Eastern and Western Paleolithic cultures, and no longer mentioned who was more advanced or backward.
However, Morwes's macroscopic observation of the differences between Eastern and Western Paleolithic cultures was quickly mapped and simplified, and the naming of "Morwes Line" was the most direct manifestation.
In the past 80 years, many studies in the academic world have been refuting and revising the "Movis Line", focusing on whether there is a hand axe or "Asheley technology" in the East.
Morwes mentioned in his 1948 article that he had found Hand-axes or "Proto-Hand-axes" in places such as Java Indonesia, Burma and Malaysia, but the number and proportion of hand axes was extremely high. Low and rougher than the Acheulean handaxe.
Therefore, he believes that the hand axe found here is different from the Acheulean hand axe, and it should be a type of tool that has evolved independently locally.
In addition, the East lacks the Levallois technology popular in the West, so Maurice believes that there are two completely different cultural circles and the evolution history of Paleolithic technology in the East and the West.
However, instead of respecting Morwes's original intention, the academic world later misinterpreted it and made it a target for criticism.
Morvis identified different cultural areas between the East and the West in the early Paleolithic: the western hand-axe culture area and the eastern smasher culture area.
Image credit: Movius HL (1948). The Lower Palaeolithic Cultures of Southern and Eastern Asia. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 38(4), 329-420.
Since the 1950s, stone tool assemblages containing hand axes have been successively discovered in East and Southeast Asia.
Archaeological discoveries made the oriental hand axe a key word in reporting, which aroused continuous discussions on the "Movis Line" in the academic community: Can the oriental hand axe be defined as an "Acheulean hand axe"?
In fact, answering this question is not easy and requires a historical, genealogical perspective, which cannot be judged on the basis of the presence or absence of individual artifacts.
On the whole, what we now know about the cultural differences between East and West in the Paleolithic is not beyond the judgment made by Morwes in the 1940s.
The overall appearance and development trajectories of Eastern and Western Paleolithic cultures are very different, and this is the most crucial difference.
This difference is also reflected in the knives in Eastern and Western kitchens: Chinese often use heavy kitchen knives to handle ingredients, while Westerners tend to use a variety of light knives with different functions.
A comparison of the Paleolithic cultural sequence on the western side of the Old World with the contemporary gravel industry traditions in southern China and Southeast Asia.
Photo courtesy of the interviewee
Under the theoretical background of human beings "walking out of Africa", are there any exchanges between Eastern and Western Paleolithic cultures?
There is some evidence of cultural exchange between East and West in the Paleolithic period, which is mainly reflected in the one-way, "advanced technological factors" from the West being found on the fringes of the East Asian hinterland.
For example, the Levallois technique and the stone leaf technique discovered in northern China more directly reflect the influence of the western Eurasian culture about 50,000 years ago.
The similarity between Eastern and Western Paleolithic cultures at this time was recognized by European scholars in the 1920s.
For example, in the book "Paleolithic Age in China" published in 1928 by the French authority on Paleolithic archaeology, Bu Riye once commented that the Ningxia Shuidonggou stone tool industry "seems to be in the well-developed Most culture and the nascent Ori. halfway between cultures, or a mixture of the two."
Stone artifacts unearthed at the Shuidonggou site in Ningxia.
Photo by Zhu Hongshan issued by China News Agency
For the hand axe found in the East, some scholars regard it as evidence of cultural exchange between the East and the West, and some people interpret it as an independent invention.
Discussing this issue requires rigorous chronological and genealogical analysis.
If the "Acheulian technology" in East Asia is explained by the propagation theory, more evidence of continuous distribution in time and space is needed, and the genealogy of the technology must be logical, whether the technology has been accepted and passed down in the local population, and how it is related to the local population. Interaction of cultural traditions.
From a global perspective, the phenomenon of the Acheulean stone tool industry is very complex. The Acheulean hand axe technology in Europe and Africa may have evolved independently. The Levallois technology may have been independently invented many times in Western Europe and Africa. Technology" may also have its own unique way of being.
It is also important to note that the "Out of Africa" model of the anthropological paradigm does not imply that culturally relevant evidence can be found.
Paleoanthropological phenomena, molecular biological phenomena and cultural phenomena are not absolutely corresponding, and the communication between people in the biological sense may not be directly reflected in cultural communication, and different people may retain the same stone tool technology.
Also, in what form does cultural exchange take place?
Is it relative equality, or is there a strong culture?
The academic world pays more attention to the new technologies brought by the Western "strong culture", but rarely talks about the export of East Asian culture.
What are the major problems that need to be solved urgently in the study of Chinese Paleolithic culture?
Two important issues need to be considered: one is the diversity of Chinese Paleolithic culture, and the other is the impact of Chinese Paleolithic culture on surrounding areas.
Senior scholars such as Pei Wenzhong and Zhang Senshui have laid a preliminary foundation for the study of the sequence and diversity of Paleolithic cultures through their macroscopic summaries of Paleolithic materials in China, but they need to be further developed.
There is a blowout of new archaeological discoveries, but few new regional cultures have been officially named.
The academic community mainly continues to use terms such as "gravel industry", "slate industry" or "XX technology" to describe related archaeological discoveries, rather than "XX culture" or "XX industry".
Compared with Western Paleolithic cultures, East Asian cultures appear monotonous.
Considering that East Asia has more than 2 million years of human history and diverse geographical environment, it is difficult not to form many local cultural traditions here, but these cultural traditions still need to be further discovered and identified.
The second question is about the possibility of "Out of China".
Under the Western anthropology paradigm, academic circles often talk about "going out of Africa", and rarely mention the impact of ancient Chinese culture on surrounding areas.
During the cold Pleistocene period, populations in southern China may have migrated further south to Southeast Asia, which would have a direct impact on Southeast Asian cultures.
At least this influence can be traced back to the Hoabinhian period, about 40,000 years ago.
In later times, Southeast Asia was influenced by more southern Chinese cultures and peoples, such as rice farming, Austronesian languages, and the proliferation of bronze technology.
For a long time, East Asia has been described as passively accepting the culture of the western side of Eurasia, and there is a relatively lack of research on the impact of East Asian populations on surrounding areas from a local perspective. question.
Archaeologists excavate and clean up a Paleolithic site in Henan.
Photo by China News Agency reporter Li Chaoqing
At the moment of building a community with a shared future for mankind, how to correctly understand the historical facts of ancient Chinese human culture?
An important connotation of a community with a shared future for mankind is mutual respect and equal treatment.
Telling the historical facts of ancient Chinese human culture requires an objective description of the facts in scientific academic language.
However, how to describe the facts is constrained by the researcher's knowledge background.
When people take the Paleolithic history of the West as a reference and directly use the terms to describe the course of their cultural history, they inevitably get caught up in terminology disputes.
On the west side of the Old World, researchers have a linear and evolutionary way of narrating the history of Paleolithic technology. Under this framework, "advanced technological factors" have become the focus, such as hand axe technology, Levallois technology, and stone leaf technology. The invention of etc. has been advanced and brought into line with the evolutionary anthropological paradigm: human intelligence continues to improve, new species of people invent new technologies, and continue to move out of Africa.
However, cultural histories that do not fit this narrative have not received enough attention.
If the Western "advanced technological factors" are used as a ruler to measure the Paleolithic culture in the world, then what we see outside the West must be a monotonous and boring technological world.
In this context, the Paleolithic culture of East Asia may be reduced to the end of Western cultural influence, and it is difficult to view East Asia's own unique history and path choices with an equal attitude.
Archaeologists simulate the production and life of ancient humans.
The knives used to dismember sheep are "stone knives" that look very sharp in ancient humans.
Photo by China News Agency Fa Luhe
A seemingly simple question is not easily answered seriously: Are the choppers in the gravel industry tradition in southern China comparable to those in the early Paleolithic in Africa?
Obviously, they do not come from the same technical cultural background.
Years of research has shown that the chopper A may be different from the chopper B/C, and the essential differences under the names of the artifacts are easily overlooked.
Even if there is a lack of "exquisite tools" in the East, it does not mean that humans at that time did not have the ability to make other complex tools, such as bamboo and wood tools.
Therefore, it is the attitude that researchers should have to treat the inventions and creations of ancient human beings in the East and the West equally; and the update of epistemology and methodology may be a key step in telling the story of ancient Chinese human culture.
(Finish)
About the Author:
Zhou Yuduan, associate professor of the Department of Archaeology, School of History, Wuhan University, member of the Professional Committee of Paleolithic Archaeology in China, and member of the French-Cambodian and French-Thai Paleolithic Joint Archaeological Teams.
Graduated from the Institute of Human Paleontology of the French National Museum of Natural History.
His research interests include Paleolithic archaeology, stone tool technology, and technical theory.
He has published more than 20 academic works, mainly including the theory of Paleolithic technology, research on peaceful cultural sites in China, Cambodia, Thailand, and Vietnam, and research on gravel industry in South China and Southeast Asia. Archaeological Research in Asia and other famous journals at home and abroad.
His recent research focuses on the culture of peace in southern China and Southeast Asia and the contemporary techno-cultural phenomena.