dwellings and animal enclosures.  They practised some agriculture; some authors believe that rice was already known to them.  They also had domesticated animals.  Their implements were of stone with rare specimens of bone.  The axes were of the rectangular type.  Metal was as yet unknown, but seems to have been introduced towards the end of the period.  They buried their dead on the higher elevations, and here the painted pottery was found.  For their daily life, they used predominantly a coarse grey pottery.

After the discovery of this culture, its pottery was compared with the painted pottery of the West, and a number of resemblances were found, especially with the pottery of the Lower Danube basin and that of Anau, in Turkestan.  Some authors claim that such resemblances are fortuitous and believe that the older layers of this culture are to be found in the eastern part of its distribution and only the later layers in the west.  It is, they say, these later stages which show the strongest resemblances with the West.  Other authors believe that the painted pottery came from the West where it occurs definitely earlier than in the Far East; some investigators went so far as to regard the Indo-Europeans as the parents of that civilization.  As we find people who spoke an Indo-European language in the Far East in a later period, they tend to connect the spread of painted pottery with the spread of Indo-European-speaking groups.  As most findings of painted pottery in the Far East do not stem from scientific excavations it is difficult to make any decision at this moment.  We will have to wait for more and modern excavations.

From our knowledge of primeval settlement in West and North-West China we know, however, that Tibetan groups, probably mixed with Turkish elements, must have been the main inhabitants of the whole region in which this painted pottery existed.  Whatever the origin of the painted pottery may be, it seems that people of these two groups were the main users of it.  Most of the shapes of their pottery are not found in later Chinese pottery.

7 The Lung-shan culture

While the Yang-shao culture flourished in the mountain regions of northern and western China around 2000 B.C., there came into existence in the plains of eastern China another culture, which is called the Lung-shan culture, from the scene of the principal discoveries.  Lung-shan is in the province of Shantung, near Chinan-fu.  This culture, discovered only about twenty-five years ago, is distinguished by a black pottery of exceptionally fine quality and by a similar absence of metal.  The pottery has a polished appearance on the exterior; it is never painted, and mostly without decoration; at most it may have incised geometrical patterns.  The forms of the vessels are the same as have remained typical of Chinese pottery, and of Far Eastern pottery in general.  To that extent the Lung-shan culture may be described as one of the direct predecessors of the later Chinese civilization.