Human Subsistence Strategies and Adaptations in the Lower Yangtze River Region During the Prehistoric Era

Abstract

Understanding the human subsistence strategies and adaptations in the Lower Yangtze River Region during the prehistoric period is vital to reveal the human-environment interactions, the origin and development of rice agriculture, cultural development, and social complexity. No systematic analysis of isotopic data of human bones in the region has been undertaken within the environmental (sea level), spatiotemporal (site distribution), and economic (animal and plant resources) contexts yet, in order to provide the direct evidence of human diets and trajectory of human subsistence strategies and adaptations. In this paper, I collected the isotopic data in the region as many as possible and incorporated within the environmental, spatiotemporal, and economic information. The results show that humans rarely made use of marine resources when facing the situation of rising sea levels and having good accesses to marine environment during the eastward movement. Alternatively, humans consumed large amount of terrestrial resources and supplementary freshwater or wetland resources. Rice agriculture was still of low-level production and contributed less to human diets. The unique human subsistence strategies enhanced human adaptations to the fluctuation of sea level in the Holocene in eastern China and facilitated the increases of archaeological cultures and human population, challenging the traditional opinion that the developed agriculture is the necessary pathway to develop cultures and grow human population.

Changes of Neolithic subsistence in south Hangzhou Bay coast, eastern China: An adaptive strategy to landscape processes

“…In the meanwhile, high contents of aquatic fungi, macrophytes, and algae may imply the existence of local swamps with open water bodies ( Innes et al, 2009 ; Liu et al, 2020 ), which provided fish, Typha , and water chestnuts to the ancient people for daily subsistence. The unearthed animal bones of buffalo and deer, together with the remains of acorns, oaks, and peaches, reflected the intake of terrestrial resources by the local people, as evidenced by the results of C and N isotopes from human bones ( Hu, 2021 ). In addition, we might infer a preference for seafood for the Jingtoushan people compared to the Kuahuqiao people based on the abundant oyster shells found at the Jingtoushan site.…”

“…In particular, the cultivation, management, and domestication of rice by Neolithic ancients are critical in the transition of the ecosystem from entirely natural to a situation severely affected by human communities. Meanwhile, changes in the spectrum of food resources and their internal mechanism are essential issues in geo-archaeology over the past decades ( Bellwood, 2005 ; Pan and Yuan, 2018 , 2019 ; Hu, 2021 ). However, the impetus for humans to shift from hunting-gathering to domestication remains uncertain ( Childe, 1936 ; Bar-Yosef, 2011 ; Fuller et al, 2014 ).…”

Transformation of animal utilization strategies from the late Neolithic to the Han Dynasty in the Hexi Corridor, northwest China: Zooarchaeological and stable isotopic evidence

“…With the rapid development of bioarchaeological research in recent decades, the spatio-temporal variation of human subsistence strategies in different corners of the planet since the Neolithic has been increasingly concerned (Piperno and Dillehay, 2008;Hu, 2018Hu, , 2021Chen et al, 2020;Fernández-Crespo et al, 2020). This has been especially true of the area around the ancient Silk Road and Eurasian Steppes (Wang et al, 2019;Zhou et al, 2020;Li et al, 2021a;Librado et al, 2021), where there were major passageways for the dispersal of farming and herding groups across Eurasia during both the prehistoric and historical periods (Dong et al, 2017;Frachetti et al, 2017;Liu et al, 2019).…”