From the Painted-Pottery Road to the Bronze Sacred Tree — The Continuation and Reinvention of Yangshao Belief Traditions in Ancient Shu

Was the cosmology and belief system of Sanxingdui an isolated development? This paper proposes and tests a two-tier framework. At the first tier, a substantially continuous material corridor carried by the painted-pottery tradition links Yangshao to Sanxingdui across roughly three millennia — a geographic framework independently established by Li Shuicheng, Chen Jian, and others, which this paper cites rather than redemonstrates. At the second tier, five major Yangshao cults — fish, bird, dragon-tiger, sun, and frog-toad — show recognisable localised developments at Sanxingdui, sharing a cosmological framework centred on the Big Dipper. Ancient DNA shows that about 90% of the Baodun population's ancestry (Sanxingdui's direct predecessor) derives from Yellow River millet-farming populations, providing biological plausibility for belief transmission. The core argument is not that individual cult elements (fish, bird, sun) are unique — they are near-universal — but that their specific forms and specific assemblage, all five present at the end of an independently established corridor, cannot be explained by independent convergent evolution. The Shan hai jing's non-Shu origin further constrains the transmission direction. The Shu–Central Plains relationship is modelled as "shared origin, divergent streams." A Dipper-related reading of the pit layout is noted as a testable hypothesis.