Piecing together China's common foundations

Ancient site reveals secrets of the past that help build evidence of a thriving society, Wang Ru reports in Fuxin, Liaoning province.

Picturing life nearly 8,000 years ago in what is now Northeast China requires a leap of imagination, but there is also hard evidence for how people lived at the time. Findings show they inhabited semi-underground dwellings, the largest of which occupied an area of 157 square meters, and which often had a fire pit in the center. Some even had two — one perhaps for cooking and another for keeping kindling materials. They also collected fruit, hunted, raised animals, and made stone tools, jade artifacts and pottery vessels.

Knowledge of their lifestyle, rudimentary as it may be, is based on research at the Chahai Site in Fuxin, Liaoning province. The settlement has yielded discoveries of not only building foundations, tombs, ash pits and moats, but also a large number of stone tools, pottery vessels and jade artifacts.

After spending several million years in the Paleolithic Age, humans entered the Neolithic Age around 10,000 years ago, a time that coincided with the Holocene Megathermal, a period characterized by relatively warm and humid climate conditions that were advantageous for survival and progress. This was when the Chahai people lived, says Li Jingyan, director of the Chahai Site Museum.