The Transition to Agriculture at Dadiwan, People’s Republic of China

Recent excavations at the Dadiwan site in the western Loess Plateau, Gansu Province, People’s Republic of China (PRC), document the first continuous foraging-to-farming sequence in North China. The Dadiwan occupation began at about 80,000 BP and became regular by about 60,000 BP, probably before the arrival or evolution of modern Homo sapiens in North China. This record spans the transitions from nonintensive to intensive hunting and gathering and from intensive hunting and gathering to low-level Laoguantai food production and finally intensive Late Banpo, Neolithic agriculture. The intensive hunter-gatherer adaptation from which Dadiwan millet agriculture evolved did not develop at Dadiwan itself. Instead, it came south with intensive hunter-gatherer groups migrating out of the arid deserts north of the Yellow River, where the late Pleistocene–early Holocene North China Microlithic was common.