8600 Year Old Earliest Writing Found In China
Archaeology Saturday, April 19, 2003 . This is a SciScoop post by Ricky James
The shells were found buried with human remains in 24 Neolithic graves unearthed at Jiahu in Henan province, western China. Aggregations of small pebbles were found close to several of the tortoise shells. The Jiahu researchers propose that the shells once contained the pebbles and were used as musical rattles in shamanistic rituals. In one grave, eight sets of tortoise shells were placed above the skeletal remains of a man whose head was missing. The shells come from graves where, in 1999, the researchers unearthed ancient bone flutes which are the earliest musical instruments known to date. This latest research on the tortise shells is published in the journal Antiquity.
The discoverers say the symbols on the shells bear similarities to written characters used thousands of years later during the Shang dynasty, which lasted from 1700-1100 BC. “What [the markings] appear to show are meaningful signs that have a correspondence with ancient Chinese writing,” said Dr Garman Harbottle, of the Brookhaven National Laboratory, specifically symbols that resemble the characters for “eye” and “window” and the numerals eight and 20 in the Shang script. The signs appeared to be highly “schematised” or stylised, a common feature of Chinese written characters. Noting the persistence of sign use at different sites along the Yellow River throughout the Neolithic and up to the Shang period, when a complex writing system appears, Harbottle emphasised that he was not suggesting the Neolithic symbols had the same meanings as Shang characters they resembled. Professor David Keightley of the University of California, Berkeley, concurred with this note of caution. “There is a gap of about 5,000 years [between them]. It seems astonishing that they would be connected,” he said.
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5 Responses to 8600 Year Old Earliest Writing Found In China
Anonymous
April 19th, 2003 at 1:31 pm
Windows existed during the stone age! That explains why it craches so much. But finding a token for “window” from the stone age is weird.
Alan Von Fan
April 19th, 2003 at 3:12 pm
“…Harbottle emphasised that he was not suggesting the Neolithic symbols had the same meanings as Shang characters they resembled. Professor David Keightley of the University of California, Berkeley, concurred with this note of caution. ‘There is a gap of about 5,000 years [between them]. It seems astonishing that they would be connected,’ he said.” That aside, languages are fluid things, that evolve to meet the needs of the generation using them. It is therefore conceivable (although unlikely in this case) that a primitive people may have used the window symbol to refer to a view, or lookout position, which later generations used as the handiest word to describe a hole cut into the side of a hut/house to enable the occupants to see insurance salesmen coming.
Anonymous
April 19th, 2003 at 8:59 pm
The article does not state how this tortoise shell was dated at the specified age. If the fairly error-prone carbon dating process was all that was used, you’ll have a difficult time convincing the skeptics. LIVING animals have been dated using radiometric dating techniques and have been assigned dates thousands and sometimes millions of years old! We need to know how exactly this date was arrived at to give the claims any credibility.
Alan Von Fan
April 20th, 2003 at 2:36 pm
Putting aside the question of fallibility, pranksters and deliberate fraudsters alike have been known to meddle with archeological sites. The approach of questioning I favour would be to ask: How sure can we be that the tortoiseshells and the bodies were interred at the same time? -and: How sure can we be that someone did not dig up the tortoiseshells, graffiti them, and replace them in the graves. Carbon dating is not infallible but the nature of archaeology is changing and more techniques are available that may provide some corroborative data.
Anonymous
June 12th, 2003 at 7:51 am
You people had missed something, there’s still evidence of syboml and markings on Chinese Neolithic pottery between the gap of 5,000 years to Shang, and this time they found markings on tortoise shell (as the Shang did later). Even without carbon dating, Jiahu is no doubt a prehistoric site.
“But Dr Harbottle points to the persistence of sign use at different sites along the Yellow River throughout the Neolithic and up to the Shang period, when a complex writing system appears.” from BBC