Landscape of Loess, Millets, and Boar

We reconsider the environmental backgrounds of early millet cultures in northern China that predate the Yangshao period (before ca. 7000 BP). Interactions among soils, millets, pigs, and changing regional climate conditioned multiple early cultivation traditions. Holocene climate influenced vegetation change, including the availability of wild millets versus other storable plants like tree nuts. Early millet cultivators were located in ecotone regions between sparser woodlands and steppe, incorporating local microenvironments that would have suited wild millets and acquisition of wild boar that became domesticated as they were moved into newly sedentary settlements. Diverse local hydrological and soil conditions shaped different regional trajectories and multiple pathways to millet domestication. The search for agricultural origins in China needs to adopt a multicentric geography and a paradigm of “protraction and entanglement” rather than pursue a single origin. The pre-Yangshao cultures reviewed here appear to be in stages of increasing landscape management, the predomestication cultivation of millets, and with varied commitments to pig management. However, this does not entail that each cultural trajectory followed through to eventual millet domestication and full agricultural economies, and we expect various intermediate economies, some of which may have been dead ends in agricultural origins.