Recorded history

The Chinese culture forms a world apart from strong isolation. Only in prehistoric times, especially the Neolithic, can we point to any contact between such distant worlds. The pottery with painted spirals of the Chinese Yang-Chao culture, in the 3rd millennium, resembles that of Southern Russia and the Danube at the same time. It has been brought from the West, perhaps by the first Chinese, farmers and herdsmen arriving from the Turkestan districts, where they were in contact with Caucasians and Indo-Germans and with other Mughal groups, the Uralo-Altaic and Turkic. Early History of Chinese Culture People were already living in the large region we now call China long before the beginning of recorded history. About 9,000 years ago, the ancestors of today's Chinese created agricultural settlements near two mighty rivers, the Yellow River and the Yangtze. Near the northernmost Yellow River, the earliest agricultural settlements consisted of wooden houses plastered with mud and roofed with reeds. Farmers cultivated a plant called millet, as well as fished in the river and hunted. Further south, people built houses on stilts in the swampy land near the Chang Jiang or "Long River". They grew rice on the waterlogged land and archaeologists have…