Complex hunter-gatherers and first farmers in southern China

Abstract

Our understanding of adaptation by hunter-gatherers in Southern China and Southeast Asia to one of the richest habitats known, has for long been dominated by the investigation of cave sites. These have provided a seriously biased interpretation that stressed transient occupation by small, mobile groups. We here provide the first Bayesian-modelled radiocarbon chronologies for three key sites in Guangxi Province, southern China. Yahuai was occupied thrice between ca. 44 ka and 16.2 ka. Jiangxi'an is an extensive settlement located on the bank of the Zuo River with two occupation phases dated between 9500 and 8300 BP. Ganzao, a second open site, lies nearby on the same river bank and extensive excavations have revealed nearly 100 burials, together with a rich assemblage of material and biological remains dated between 10,300–9500 BP. These river-bank settlements and contemporary coastal sites evidence a radically different adaptation to that derived from rock shelters alone, that coincided with the Holocene thermal optimum and provide a compelling image of the affluent, sedentary hunter-gatherer communities that encountered and were assimilated by the farmers who penetrated the region from their homeland in the Yangtze River region during the third millennium BCEE.