Social Sciences in China (Chinese Edition)

No. 11, 2025

The Origins of Chinese Agriculture and the Formation of Early Agricultural Cultural Patterns

(Abstract)

Dai Xiangming

The earliest archaeological evidence of agriculture in China—rice (Oryza sativa) in the south and foxtail millet (Setaria italica)/common millet (Panicum miliaceum) in the north—dates to around 10,000 years ago, found respectively in the Shangshan culture of the Qiantang River Basin and the Donghulin culture of northern China. Building on this, attention should also be given to the two “flanking hilly regions”: the southern edge of the middle and lower Yangtze River Plain and the northern margin of the North China Plain. With similar environmental conditions and broader geographic scope, these long and narrow zones may also have served as original centers of agriculture. Following the slow development of agriculture during the early to the early phase of the middle Neolithic, the onset of the Holocene warm period spurred rapid agricultural growth and diffusion in both northern and southern regions. Cultures with agricultural economies quickly proliferated across a region extending from the Liao River in the north to the northern foothills of the Nanling-Wuyi Mountains in the south. By the later middle Neolithic period, these cultures spread further westward to the Loess Plateau and the mountainous areas at the west of the Hubei and Hunan regions. This process gradually produced a networked pattern of early agricultural cultures across China. In these early agricultural cultures, although farming had not yet become the dominant economic activity, it often represented an important, even indispensable, subsistence resource within more mature settled communities, which can be termed “agriculture-dependent societies.”