QUOTE (ShandongDaHan @ Feb 16 2010, 11:08 PM)
it's hard to come by. however I have found this:
http://www.shakuhachi.com/K-9KChineseFlutes-Nature.html. even though this is about ancient Chinese flutes, there are brief mentions of physical anthropological evidence in the 4th paragraph down, about the remains of the people being excavated from the ancient chinese neolithic sites and has plenty of citations both Chinese and Western. so I'll have to take its word for it until I find further evidence. it mainly talks about the Jiahu remains, considering the the 9000 year old flutes were found at that site and the relation between the Jiahu remains and the remains found in Dawenkou, Xiawangang, Yedian, etc. like i said its not in depth though . but it definitely makes my theory of the Dawenkou more solid
I find your Dawenkou theory plausible though requiring more genetic and anthropological support. My impression of neolithic populations in China is that they expanded and contracted over the course of several thousand years, and then began mixing as states and empires were built. Linguistically, if we accept Sinitic as a Sino-Tibetan language, then an ancestral link with Tibet is plausible though not proven. Genetic evidence would seem to favor the view that O3 is a southwestern, rather than southeastern, haplotype with very ancient roots, and we see that the most "homogeneous" O3 tribes tend to be southwestern Tibeto-Burman tribes in Yunnan and northeastern India. It is possible that O3 represents a paleolithic, rather than neolithic, expansion from that area, which would then explain its initially inland distribution. Meanwhile, O1 and O2 might have spread along the coast, with O2 bifurcating into two separate haplogroups: one in southern Manchuria and one in southeast Asia. O1 is also found as far north as Manchuria, thus lending credence to the idea that there was a coastal expansion. None of this, of course, assumes absolute homogeneity: there is currently too little ancient genetic evidence to say to what degree the different populations were mixed.
By the time history began, however, it is likely that the expansive Longshan culture already represented a vast, dynamic community of regional chiefdoms, wherein O3 has already expanded to the coast and maybe even beyond. Thus, we see in Erlitou, Shang, and Zhou evidence of influence from every nearby culture. The core lingua franca between these cultures would have been Sinitic, as evidenced by the writing system they developed and also by the fact that a strong early influence was necessary to explain the later prominence of this language family, which gradually became the primary language family of all northern China, and then southern China as history progressed, despite periods of foreign dominance by Altaic-speaking peoples. What remains mysterious is the nature of Yangshao and Hongshan, and of course even earlier proto-cultures. In my experience, many researchers believe that Yangshao and Longshan were genetically related, but still cannot explain the nature of the relationship. Hongshan I've not seen any genetic studies of.
Regardless, if we accept that modern Chinese populations are predominantly O3, and that the coastal Yangtze neolithic cultures were predominantly O1, while the more inland Yangtze cultures were predominantly O2, then it makes no sense to say that modern Chinese came primarily from the Yangtze River farmers, unless by this it is meant that their ancestors migrated
through that region to reach northern China. Even this claim is somewhat dubious, however, as one would expect a much larger presence of O3 in the Yangtze region, originally. Furthermore, the Yellow River Chinese farmed millet, if I am not mistaken, not rice. Thus, the rice farmer expansion theory can no longer be accepted.
what's language a pre-historic neolithic group spoke?