Genghis Khan: Father to Millions? Discovery - June 2004

Genghis Khan left a legacy shared by 16 million people alive today, according to a book by a Oxford geneticist who identified the Mongol emperor as the most successful alpha male in human history.

China had first complex machines BBC - June 2004

Spiral ring reveals ancient complex machines. Carved decorations on jades from ancient China are generally thought to have been made by hand, or with simple machines that worked with a single movement.
Story - New Scientist

Archeologists have dug up a 1,000-year-old padded bra in China Ananova - June 2004

Concord Monitor - April 3, 2004

Martine "Frederique" Darragon fell under the spell of an elusive phenomenon scattered across the foothills of the Himalayas. Old stone towers, some vaguely star-shaped and some more than 100 feet tall became a near obsession for Darragon as she found their origin to be a mystery.

Darragon told Smithsonian magazine's Richard Stone that when she asked local residents about the towers - Who built them? When? Why? - nobody seemed to have a clue. What she had stumbled on was rare indeed: a riddle in plain sight.

Over five years, she journeyed nine times to western China, where she saw nearly 200 of the towers in Sichuan Province and Tibet. She photographed and measured them, climbed into them when possible and carved off bits of wooden beams for analysis. Local monks told her they'd found no mention of the structures in centuries-old monastery documents. Still, she did find a few references to the towers in some Chinese annals and in the diaries of 19th-century Western travelers to the region.

From 2000 to 2003, Darragon shipped pieces of wood from 32 towers to a laboratory in Miami for radiocarbon dating. Most of the wood samples she had tested are several hundred years old, and the towers from which they came are presumably the same age.

But one structure in Kongpo, Tibet proved much older. It was likely built between 1,000 and 1,200 years ago. The dating method isn't definitive and it's possible that the wood used by some tower builders was already very old, in which case the structures may be younger.

Local ignorance of the towers' original purpose may trace to the area's history and geography. A millennium ago, the place was dominated by mountain tribes that, over the centuries, have maintained isolation. "People in one valley usually cannot understand what is said in the next valley," Darragon told Stone. She wonders if knowledge of the towers that was once passed down orally may have been lost as dialects evolved or disappeared.

Darragon was especially intrigued by the more than 40 roughly star-shaped towers she encountered. Some have eight points, others 12, but both configurations are rare. Darragon speculates that the star shape makes the Chinese structures less susceptible to tremors. "All the people I asked in the villages said the towers resist earthquakes," Darragon said.

The question remains: Why were they built? One idea is they served a religious function, perhaps representing the "dmu" cord that, according to Tibetan legend, is said to connect heaven and earth.

Alternatively, some scholars suggest the structures were watchtowers or forts. "The towers were built for defense," said Marielle Prins, a linguist with the Southwest Institute for Nationalities in Chengdu, China. "Most of them are from the Jinchuan Wars."

Eric Mortensen, a Tibet scholar at National Taiwan University, said the structures were "likely used as signal towers." He bases that conclusion on their locations, which generally provide a line of sight from one another.

But some scholars suggest that the towers are not so mysterious after all. "If there's any mystery surrounding them, it's no doubt partly a product of Western mythology around anything Tibetan and the fact that until recently the Chinese forbade access to the region," said Alex Gardner, a Buddhism specialist at the University of Michigan. "I don't see how they could be called 'unknown' when they are visible for miles, and the region is crisscrossed with trading routes and now automobile roads."

Meanwhile, the mysteries of the towers continue to rattle Darragon's mind, and her sleuthing will continue. The self-described free spirit, has purchased a home in a valley in the Kham region of China, settling down next door to a tower.

'Earliest writing' found in China BBC - April 2003
Earliest handwriting found? Nature - April 2003


Symbols carved into tortoise shells more than 8,000 years ago may be the oldest words yet discovered. The findings may also shed light on the ritualistic practices of Neolithic China. The relics were unearthed at a mass-burial site at Jiahu in the Henan Province of western China. Twenty-four graves yielded 14 shells bearing 11 different signs.

Great Wall blocks gene flow Nature - April 2003

Earliest salamanders discovered BBC - April 2003
Specimens up to 165 million years old - in fossil beds in Mongolia and China

Massive Haul of Ancient Coins Fished out of SW China River April 2003 - People Daily

Ruins 4,300-years-old found January 2003 - ABC

Following the China Walls deep into China's rural heart January 2003 - National Geographic

Did the Chinese discover America? January 2003 - CNN Book: A massive Chinese fleet of huge junks and support ships made a two-year circumnavigation of the globe, with extensive exploration of the Americas, nearly a century before Magellan and Columbus.

China 'had express postal service' in 221 BC August 2002 - CNN

China - Fossil of a two-million-year-old ancestor of the elephant August 2002 - Ananova
Include a pair of 8-foot long tusks

1000-year-old Well Still Gives out Clear Water June 2002 - China.org

Tombs of Ancient Eunuchs Discovered in Beijing June 2002

Oldest map in China found - 2,200 years old Pravada News - May 2002

A find of Bashkir scientists' contraries to traditional notions of human history: stone stabs, which are 120 million years covered with the relief map of Ural Region. The map contains civil engineering works: a system of channels with a length of about 12,000 km, weirs, powerful dams. Not far from the channels, diamond-shaped grounds are shown, whose destination is unknown. The map also contains some inscriptions. Even numerous inscriptions. Originally scientists thought it was an Old Chinese language. Later it was discovered that the subscriptions were done in a hieroglyphic-syllabic language of unknown origin.

November 9, 2000 - Reuters

China's ancient civilization has just gotten a little older -- officially at least.

A government-funded study released Thursday pushed back the dates of China's earliest dynasties, shedding light on the origins of Chinese civilization and adding fuel to a controversy over the influence of politics on scholarship.

The fruit of the biggest research project China has conducted into its early civilization, the findings could be significant, if they are accepted.

They document the emergence of early Chinese kingdoms from the prehistoric New Stone Age and edge China's verifiable history to more than 4,000 years ago - a 1,200-year jump.

"The results solve a batch of knotty questions long left uncertain in our country's historical chronology and fill in the blank spaces in our country's ancient annals," project director Li Xueqin said, unveiling the report at a news conference.

But the project's origins immediately raised questions about its likely findings among scholars in China and abroad - even before the research began.

Dubbed the "history project," the study was commissioned in 1995 by Cabinet member Song Jian, a physicist by training. The government made it a national priority in its five-year plan that ends this year.

The project's stated mission was to fix dates for three dynasties: the half-documented Zhou, the shadowy Shang and the myth-shrouded Xia.

But critics said Song pressured the researchers to prove China has a 5,000-year history, to equal claims made by other ancient civilizations.

"There are factors of national prestige involved," said David Nivison, a retired Stanford University scholar who has made dating China's early dynasties a 30-year preoccupation. "Establishing the Xia as history, not legend, gives China a validated, authenticated history that rivals Babylonia or Egypt."

Still, "I think they're all wrong," said Nivison, in a telephone interview.

"I've seen their chronology and maybe they've got two dates right," said Nivison, who has his calculated his own set of dates for events in ancient Chinese history dating to 2026 B.C.

History has long been an instrument of pride and power in China.

Dynastic historians rewrote records to glorify patrons and demonize enemies.

In the last 51 years, the communists have cited peasant uprisings against corrupt rulers to justify their revolution.

More recently, they have urged scientists to prove early humans developed in China, not in Africa as commonly held.

Politics aside, the history project focused serious science on questions debated for 2,000 years.

It brought together 200 Chinese historians, archaeologists, astronomers and specialists in seven other fields - an unprecedented marriage of the natural and social sciences for China, project director Li said.

They used fast-spinning electrical fields to shave atoms off tortoise shells and ox shoulder blades - ancient tools for divination - to date them more accurately.

They used computers to calculate the dates of eclipses mentioned in inscriptions on 3,000-year-old bones and bronzes and in texts disputed for centuries.

In the end, Li said, the project pushed past the last accepted definite date in Chinese history - the death of a Zhou king in 841 B.C.

It fixed the dates for earlier Zhou kings and the last Shang rulers going back to 1300 B.C. and broadly outlined the earlier period, setting the Xia's origins to 2070 B.C. - the middle of the well-excavated prehistoric Longshan culture.

July 26, 2000 - UPI

Chinese academics already lay claim to golf. Rumor suggests footballs first took flight in China. And this week, China took on another sacred British invention: the flush toilet. Archaeologists in Shangqiu, central Henan province, have unearthed a 2,000 year-old water closet, entombed with a king of the Western Han Dynasty to ensure he sat on the finest throne even in the afterlife.

"This top-grade stool is the earliest of its kind ever discovered in the world, meaning that the Chinese used the world's earliest water closet," the archaeological team told state news agency Xinhua. The stone latrine, boasting flush water piping and an armrest for added comfort, was a "great invention and a symbol of social civilization of that time."

The Chinese revelation is sure to stir up a steaming debate in the murky world of lavatorial history. British claims to the flush toilet rest on the efforts of Thomas Crapper (1836-1910), royal sanitary engineer, but historians have long questioned Crapper's legacy.

He may not even be responsible for adding "crap" to the language. A definitive answer may lie deep in an Indiana Jones style underground palace near Xian in Shaanxi province, where the tomb of China's First Emperor, overthrown by the Western Han (206 BC to 8 AD), still awaits excavation. Besides a fabled treasure trove, his terracotta army may be guarding the ultimate toilet of the ancient world.

There has been some decline since those days. Foreigners "cry, smile, scream and jump" when they encounter public toilets on the mainland today, according to expert Lou Xiaoqi. They cry because the smell brings tears to the eyes, smile to hide the embarrassment of squatting among strangers, usually without partitions, scream at the rats that inhabit the lavatories, and jump to avoid the waste of previous visitors. Lou has launched a "toilet revolution" to clean up China's festering facilities.

If China's claims are authenticated, the publicity could prove a boon for local firm Henan Shangqiu Steel Factory, which manufactures deluxe superloos designed with traditional Chinese rooves. Its main rival, American Standard, is one of the few foreign companies in China growing flush with cash.

May 6, 2000 - BBC

China is planning to rebuild parts of the oldest section of the Great Wall - its most famous landmark dating back more than 2,000 years.

Centuries of rain, wind and vandalism have taken their toll, and much of the wall is in urgent need of repair.

Now China's Bureau of Cultural Relics has announced plans to restore a five-kilometer stretch in the mountains of Inner Mongolia.

The bureau has allocated 600,000 yuan ($72,290) to make the repairs and says that the project is the first effort to renovate larger portions of the Great Wall.

Work is expected to take at least five years, after which the ancient monument will be open to tourists. It is planned that 1,000 meters of the wall will be repaired each year.

The wall will be restored to its original appearance using rocks from mountains.

However, limited funds and lack of equipment means that many sections will not be renovated.

The Great Wall is said to be the only manmade object visible from space.

From its starting point on the coast north of Beijing, the wall rolls an astonishing 6,500 km across mountains and deserts until it finally peters out in the country's arid far west.

When first built more than 2,000 years ago, it stood more than 3.5 meters high, 4.1 meters wide on the bottom and 1.5 meters wide at the top.

It required hundreds of thousands of workers and took 10 years to complete.

Most of the famous stretches of the wall visited by tourists were actually built much later, during the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties.

Many stretches of the wall were extensively repaired under the Ming and Quing, and are in better condition.

The older wall was built by the Qin dynasty, after it united China in 221 BC. It runs further north across the wild mountains that form the southern edge of the Mongolian step.

Originally launched last year, the project stalled because of lack of funds. Only 300 meters of the section have been renovated so far.

April 28, 2000 - Xinhua News Agency - Jinan, China,

After years of arduous effort, Chinese archaeologists have confirmed that the inscriptions on a 4, 800-year-old piece of pottery unearthed in Juxian County in east China's Shandong Province are the earliest form of Chinese characters ever found.

These hieroglyphs, called Dawenkou Pottery Inscriptions by the archaeologists, predate the inscriptions on bones and tortoise shells unearthed in the Yin Ruins and the remains of the late Shang Dynasty (1600-1100 B.C.) in Anyang in central China's Henan Province, which have long been considered the oldest Chinese characters.

"This pushes back the history of the Chinese script by some 2,000 years," Wang Shuming, a research fellow with the Shandong Institute of Relics and Archeology in charge of the excavation, told Xinhua Thursday.

The pottery inscriptions first came to light in the early 1960s when an ancient pottery wine vessel bearing several strange drawings was discovered by farmers in Juxian, the center of the ancient Ju culture in southeastern Shandong Province.

Tang Lan, a well-known Chinese paleographer, at that time regarded the drawings as pictographs, though his view was neglected because there was a lack of supporting evidence.

In the 1980s, more than 30 tombs belonging to the late period of the Neolithic Dawenkou Culture (4500-2500 B.C.) were excavated in Juxian, where pottery wine vessels with 20 stylized pictures of some physical objects were unearthed, providing more clues to an earlier form of Chinese characters.

Archaeologists and paleographers have since recognized 14 of the more than 20 drawings as pictographs and deciphered them as seven characters, including "fan" (ordinary), "nan" (south), and "xiang" (enjoy).

"A script must have regular forms and given pronunciations and express certain meanings," Wang said. "The pottery hieroglyphs evidently satisfy this criteria."

Many archaeologists agree that Taihao people, a legendary tribe inhabiting Juxian, which worshipped the wine god and the god of the land, created the pottery inscriptions.

The pottery inscriptions, they said, reflect sacrificial rites at that time, just as other ancient writings did. For example, the pictograph "nan" looks like people forming an altar to worship a young tree, signifying the rite of praying to the god of the land for good harvests.

Similar pottery wine vessels with inscriptions were also discovered in Anhui and Zhejiang provinces, both in east China, in the 1990s.

Jiao Zhiqin, an associate research fellow with the Anyang Museum, said this was the result of the tribe's migrations, adding that such migrations are recorded in Chinese histories.

"This demonstrates that the writing was used over a large area, with Juxian at the center," said Jiao at a forum on Ju Culture held here recently.

CRADLE OF CHINESE CIVILIZATION

Yin Junke, a research fellow with the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences, said the creation of the writing was not sudden, because this area was one of the cradles of Chinese civilization.

Archaeologists have also found some similarities between these pottery inscriptions and those on bones and tortoise shells, in terms of both form and meaning.

They said this indicates that the latter had evolved from the former.

Chinese archaeologists have long held that the inscriptions found at the Yin Ruins were not the oldest, and there must have been a previous period of origin and development of the language.

The first bones and tortoise shells with character inscriptions were discovered in 1899 in a village in Henan Province, where the capital of the Shang Dynasty was located. Since then, more than 160,000 pieces of inscribed bones and tortoise shells with about 10,000 characters have been unearthed, some 1,000 of which have been deciphered.

These inscriptions, like the cuneiform writing of the ancient Near East and the hieroglyphic writing of ancient Egypt, are one of the world's oldest scripts. Their descendants, the "han zi" (modern Chinese characters) are still in use by one-fourth of the world's population.

Xinhua News Agency - May 25, 1999

SHIJIAZHUANG (May 24) XINHUA - Chinese scholars have identified a collection of bamboo slips unearthed in a 2,000-year- old tomb as the earliest edition of the Confucian Analects.

The bamboo version was found in a tomb in Hebei Province, which archeologists say belongs to an emperor of the Han Dynasty (206 BC -- 220 AD) and dates back possibly to 55 BC.

Local farmers who were digging water control facilities first discovered the tomb in the early 1990s. A great number of bamboo slips have been unearthed, but most of the characters on them were illegible and archeologists had to use modern techniques to reveal their true nature. Ultimately they reached the conclusion that some of them were from the Analects, a collection of major doctrines and sayings of the educator and philosopher Confucius (551 -- 479 BC).

The book is more than 2,000 years old and is the earliest edition of a Confucian work ever found, according to Xie Fei, the director of the Hebei Cultural Relics Research Institute, who examined the slips along with scholars from the State Cultural Relics Bureau and Beijing's Palace Museum.

The collection consists of more than 620 bamboo slips, which were used by the ancient Chinese before the use of paper was popularized. They measure 16.2 centimeters by 0.7 centimeters and contain as many as 20 characters each. There are also traces of the silk strings that were used to connect them.