Food and Environment in Early and Medieval China. E. N. Anderson

is equivocal but does not rule out an East Asian input into the domestic dog. Chinese has two words for dog. An ordinary dog is gou. The other word is a classical stylish word, guan, “hound,” an obvious Indo-European borrowing (Mair 1998) cognate with the English word. Mair thinks gou too may be IE (from Tocharian), but it seems to be older and indigenous, and I think it derives from the proto-Tibeto-Burman (= proto-Sino-Tibetan) form, which was something like *kwe.

      Dogs too suffered from the skull and tooth reduction that marks modern animals; compared to wolves, dogs have 30 percent less brain mass. The difference comes largely in the sensory, motor, and emotional areas of the brain; fierceness and extreme power have been bred out of them (Zeder 2012).

      Meanwhile, sheep were domesticated around 8000 BCE in the Near East. Recent evidence suggests that domesticated sheep came from the Near East across Central Asia. It now seems highly unlikely that sheep were domesticated independently in China (contrary to earlier speculations, e.g., E. Anderson 1988). In China they may go back to 4000 (Liu 2004: 59), but probably only to 2500 (Jing and Campbell 2009). The sheep are of a species found all across Asia then and now (Jing and Campbell 2009), but domestic sheep appear to be directly descended from a Near Eastern subspecies; still, the question is not closed. They are found earlier in Central Asia than in China.

      Goats, which are strictly Near Eastern in origin, did not appear in China till 2800 BCE (Liu 2004: 59). Cattle and other Near Eastern domesticates got to China even later (cattle by 2500; Jing and Campbell 2009). Magnificent longhorns like Texas longhorns are shown on bronze sculptures from the Dian culture in early medieval Yunnan (personal observation, Yunnan Provincial Museum). Other early animals include chickens, domesticated apparently in what is now southern China (B. West and Zhou 1988) by 4000 BCE or earlier (Liu 2004), almost certainly by Thai-speaking peoples (see above).

      Water buffaloes, so essential to rice cultivation, were possibly domesticated as early as 5000 BCE (Olsen 1993) but probably not till much later, since early finds claimed to be domestic were actually wild (Liu 2004: 59). The buffaloes appear especially in the Hemudu area (lower Yangzi Valley), already a center of rice agriculture (as it still is). Water buffaloes were certainly domesticated by the dawn of empire in China—some 2000 years ago or earlier. They seem, however, to have been of an Indian variety, which, if true, means they were introduced already domesticated, from farther southwest (Liu and Chen 2012:109–10).

      Horses came only later and will be discussed below. Wild animals exploited in the early Neolithic include “sika deer, water buffalo, water deer, hare, cat, raccoon dog, tiger, and bear” (Liu 2004: 59), among others. All these are still eaten or used for medicine.

      Around 7000 years ago, the Western world experienced a dramatic “secondary products revolution” (Sherratt 1981). This was the development in the Near East (rapidly spreading to Europe) of dairying, wool production, hide processing, and use of other products of domestic animals over and above meat and furred skins. China never took to dairying, but it did do a great deal with hides, hair, and bones; the early cities had bone workshops that reached considerable size.

       Meanwhile in Central Asia … Another Neolithic

      Central Asia consists of a series of ecological zones stretching across the Eurasian continent. The tundra and taiga of the far north give way to forest-steppe and then to steppes, which in turn gradually merge into deserts in the mid latitudes. The climate is extreme continental, with intensely cold winters and unbearably hot summers. High mountains, usually in ranges oriented east-west, dominate the distant landscapes. A particularly high knot extends from Tibet north through the Pamirs and Tianshan to the Altai; many peaks rise well over 20,000 feet. At the west and east ends, in Kazakhstan and China respectively, the steppes grade into farming areas. The deserts contain many linear oases, some very large, along the rivers that drain the high mountains. These linear oases have been the seats of great civilizations for the last two to two and a half millennia.

      Westerners tend to imagine a vast grassland stretching for thousands of miles. The truth is more complex. The vast grasslands are in the northern, northwestern, and northeastern borderlands of Central Asia proper and are broken by low mountain ranges and rivers. The vast empty spaces without mountains, lakes, or rivers occupy almost all of Kazakhstan—the true steppe nation—and a great deal of Mongolia, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan, as well as neighboring countries. These areas are much drier, ranging from extremely dry grassland to waterless desert. Outside Kazakhstan and northern Turkmenistan, however, they are broken at fairly frequent intervals by large river or lake valleys that drain the snow ranges to the south and east. These valleys permit intensive agriculture.

      Thus, the true picture of Central Asia is a rather coarse-grained mosaic. In the north and in the many mountain valleys and slopes of the east and south, there is good grazing, and here the famous nomads raised stock (Khazanov 1984; Vainstein 1980). In the river valleys, which are concentrated in the south, large-scale intensive agriculture is practiced today. An interesting feature of this agriculture throughout history, but apparently not in prehistoric times, is the extreme importance of tree and vine cropping. Apricots, mulberries, grapes, melons, almonds (in the far south of the region—they cannot take cold), and other such crops have been staple foods, not just minor dessert items. This sort of cultivation has not fared well in recent decades (and no doubt at many times in the past), due to escalating wars and scorched-earth policies; trees do not regrow fast enough.

      Civilization flourished here, especially after 500 BCE, reaching a climax in the centuries of the Silk Road. In between are vast deserts, almost worthless, providing major barriers to travel. The Takla Makan Desert of Chinese Central Asia is one of the world’s driest, with virtually no rain. Major travel routes followed the rivers whenever possible, thus keeping relatively close to the southern fringes of the region. There was, however, also a great deal of contact across the northern approaches, where grassland and forest-steppe permitted nomadic and forest-based livelihood. North of that, subarctic forest eventually became used for specialized reindeer herding.

      Agriculture spread to the western steppe-margins very early. At the opposite end of the steppes from China, the Tripolye and Cucuteni cultures, in modern Ukraine and Romania, built enormous towns with extremely elaborate and beautiful ceramics, at the same time as the Ubaid culture was developing rapidly toward urbanism in the Near East: roughly 5500–3000 BCE (Anthony 2007; Kohl 2007). The huge Tripolye and Cucuteni sites are not ancestral to any modern culture; they apparently were eclipsed by Indo-Europeans. They grew “emmer, einkorn, bread wheat, barley, peas, vetch, lentils, sheep, goats, cattle, pigs, buckwheat, millet (P. miliaceum), and both wild-type and domestic grapes” (Kohl 2007: 44). The Yamnaya cultural horizon, occurring in the same general area, may have involved early Indo-Europeans (Anthony 2007). Cities and writing arose in Mesopotamia and Egypt around 3200 BCE, indirectly influencing the steppes through trade.

      Meanwhile, the first indications of contact with China are visible: panic millet turned up in Europe by 4000 BCE and was common by 5500 in the Linearbandkeramik and other cultures (Bellwood 2005: 21). (The Linearbandkeramik, or LBK, archaeological culture was the first agricultural manifestation in most of central Europe; it spread very rapidly from the east around 5500 BCE.) Millet probably spread from China, though domestication in Central Asia is also possible. It was a crop in Central Asia by 2200 (Frachetti 2012; Frachetti et al. 2010). A glass bead from the Near East at 2900 shows early contact in the other direction (Anthony 2007: 354).

      However, it seems likely that there were far earlier contacts between East and West. Pottery spread through Siberia to the West. The earliest European pottery looks very much like the much earlier Chinese ware. Later, the similarities in shape, color, size, and design between Tripolye, early Mesopotamian, and Yangshao pottery styles are so striking that they have long been noted (e.g., Andersson 1934, 1943). While denied by excessively cautious scholars who note slight differences in the designs, these similarities are so numerous, striking, and close that to ignore them is pedantic.

      Statuettes associated with trees and fertility, and stylistically close to Near Eastern analogues, appear around 3000 BCE. They may be connected with the cult of sacred trees that endures in Central Asia in spite of Islamic puritanism; ten-foot-thick plane trees, elms that ooze healing sap, and other wonderful trees are frequent and