List of Neolithic cultures of China

This is a list of Neolithic cultures of China that have been discovered by archaeologists. They are sorted in chronological order from the earliest founding to the latest and are followed by a schematic visualization of these cultures.

It would seem that the definition of Neolithic in China is undergoing changes. The discovery in 2012 of pottery about 20,000 years BP indicates that this measure alone can no longer be used to define the period. It will fall to the more difficult task of determining when cereal domestication started.

The list

Schematic outline

These cultures are brought together schematically for the period 8500 to 1500 BC. Neolithic cultures remain unmarked and Bronze Age cultures (from 2000 BC) are marked with *. There are many differences in opinion by dating these cultures, so the dates chosen here are tentative:

For this schematic outline of its neolithic cultures China has been divided into the following nine parts:

Chinese

Chinese can refer to:

Chinese language

Chinese (汉语/漢語; Hànyǔ or 中文; Zhōngwén) is a group of related but in many cases mutually unintelligible language varieties, forming a branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. Chinese is spoken by the Han majority and many other ethnic groups in China. Nearly 1.2 billion people (around 16% of the world's population) speak some form of Chinese as their first language.

The varieties of Chinese are usually described by native speakers as dialects of a single Chinese language, but linguists note that they are as diverse as a language family. The internal diversity of Chinese has been likened to that of the Romance languages, but may be even more varied. There are between 7 and 13 main regional groups of Chinese (depending on classification scheme), of which the most spoken by far is Mandarin (about 960 million), followed by Wu (80 million), Yue (60 million) and Min (70 million). Most of these groups are mutually unintelligible, although some, like Xiang and the Southwest Mandarin dialects, may share common terms and some degree of intelligibility. All varieties of Chinese are tonal and analytic.

Sinitic languages

The Sinitic languages, are a family of Sino-Tibetan languages, often synonymous with the group of Chinese varieties. They have frequently been postulated to constitute a primary branch, but this is rejected by an increasing number of researchers. The Bai languages and possible relatives, whose classification is difficult, may also be Sinitic; otherwise Sinitic is equivalent to Chinese, and the term may be used to indicate that the varieties of Chinese are distinct languages rather than dialects of a single language.

References

Works cited