Located in the northern part of Shaanxi Province, the site of Shiyuan was discovered by a group of archaeologists who exclaimed "Stone Breaking Heaven", one was surprised by the huge military defense volume of the Shiyuan site, and the other was surprised that there was no direct written record of Shiyuan in the history books, so that future generations were confused about what kind of people were in the Shiyuan ethnic group?
One faction, represented by Han Jianye, a professor of archaeology at Renmin University, argues that the Shiyuan people may be the ancestors of Beidi; One faction, represented by Professor Shen Changyun, a well-known expert on pre-Qin history in China, advocated that the Shiyuan people were the tribe of the Yellow Emperor. These two theories are actually relatively similar, and in the final analysis, they both believe that the Shiyuan people are the descendants of the Yellow Emperor ("The Classic of Mountains and Seas" records that "there is a country of Beidi. The grandson of the Yellow Emperor is called Shi Jun, and Shi Jun was born in Beidi), the difference is only in whether it is the Yellow Emperor's own clan or a side branch.
There is also a group of scholars, represented by Professor Yi Hua of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, who argues that the Shiyuan site is the early capital of the Xia Dynasty, Yangcheng or Yangzhai, in other words, Professor Yi Hua believes that the Shiyuan people are the Xia people.
It is not easy for a regime with internally multicultural elements to determine the ethnicity from an archaeological point of view, because it involves not only the common people but also the upper nobility, and the two groups may be different**.
Taking the Yue regime in the Spring and Autumn Period as an example, its main ethnic group belonged to Baiyue, and its royal family, according to historical records, "the Miao descendants of its Xianyu, and the concubines of Emperor Shaokang of Xiahou", that is, belonged to the Xiahou clan.
In 2022, Fu Qiaomei's team from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences came to the following conclusions after conducting mitochondrial DNA testing on 172 cases of ancient humans from the late Yangshao period to the Longshan period in the Shiyuan site and the Jinnan area
The Shiyuan people mainly originated from the local early population in northern Shaanxi. At the same time, the Shiyuan population has a closer genetic relationship with the ancient populations in the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River, which also lived in the Longshan period rather than the late Yangshao period. Furthermore, the matrilineal genetic relationship between the Shiyun population and the modern northern Han population north of the Huai River in the Qinling Mountains is closer than that of other ancient populations in the Yellow River Basin.
Since the samples tested are from the Huangchengtai in the center of Shiyuan, the Hanjiaqidan in the inner city, the east gate site of the outer city, and the ruins of the wooden pillars and pillars of the second-level satellite city, the ruins of the Shenqi Yuanliang and other sites, so generally speaking, from the queen to the commoner women, they all belong to the same ethnic group, and they are all matrilineal ancestors of the modern northern Han people.
Recently, it has been claimed that a paternal DNA sample was extracted from the Shiyuan site, and the test result was N-F963, and then it was inferred that there was a branch of Ji Zhou ancestors among the Shiyuan nobles. However, judging from the sample designation SM-K4-1, it is from the No. 4 pit of Shiyuan, which is the skull sacrificial pit under the city wall northwest of Mamian No. 1.
Judging from the location alone, it is difficult to determine whether this sample is representative of the Shiyun ethnic group. Moreover, only one sample from one location is not telling.
Therefore, before further molecular anthropological research results are published, the key to solving the problem returns to archaeology.
7,000 years ago, the Yangshao cultural group at the eastern foot of Taihang Mountain went north to Liangcheng County in central Inner Mongolia through Shanxi and Hebei to form the Shihushan ruins settlement, while the Yangshao cultural Banpo people formed the Shihushan No. 1 ruins settlement 300 meters away.
6,000 years ago, some of the Yangshao cultural temple ditch type people formed a settlement of ruins under the slope of the king's tomb nearby; 5,800 years ago, another Yangshao cultural group on the eastern side of Taihang Mountain, the Dasikong culture type, went north again, and collided with the Hongshan cultural group in western Liaoning to form a settlement of Haisheng Bulang ruins. The typical feature of this settlement is the stone wall.
After the formation of the Haisheng Bulang settlement, the descendants of the Yangshao culture who had arrived in the central and southern part of Inner Mongolia were quickly integrated, and finally the Haisheng Bulang cultural group was formed. About 5,000 years ago, the Haisheng Bulang culture evolved into the Laohushan culture (the distinctive feature is the use of mustaches as cooking utensils), and the Shiyuan culture is the product of the Laohushan culture group moving south to northern Shaanxi.
At the same time as the stone ridge, which was formed at this time node of 4300 years ago, is the Taosi site in southern Jinnan, and the two are not only culturally but also matrilineally inherited.
It can be assumed that the Shiyuan and the main group of Taosi have a common matriarchal line**, but the upper nobles who ruled the regime may belong to different cultural groups. Specifically, it is manifested in:
The concept of building the royal city (Huangchengtai) of Shiyuan is a high-rise building made of graded stones; The concept of building the royal city (Miyagi) of Tao Temple is the walled style inherited from the Central Plains. The Shiyun people inlaid a large number of jade artifacts in the city walls, while the Tao Temple buried the jade artifacts in the tombs. The Tao Temple was the first to form a ritual system, while the Stone Pass experienced a long period of chaos.
Regarding the "chaos" of the stone pass, there is another phenomenon worth paying attention to: the stone pass used a lot of stone carvings of gods in the construction of the city wall, but these stone carvings carved with gods are placed very casually, and some are even inverted, judging from the degree of weathering of the stones, the stone carvings of the gods may have been dismantled from other city walls. In addition, the construction age of the No. 1 courtyard of the Shiyuan site was after the abandonment of the Imperial City Terrace, and it was built by the Zhu Kaigou group, which also belonged to the Laohushan culture.
There are various indications that as a political entity, Shiyuan has undergone many "infighting" and "dynastic" changes in the nearly 500 years of its existence, and the many skull sacrificial pits found in Shiyuan archaeological area are not only the products of foreign wars.
If the Tao Temple is judged to be the remains of Yaodu, then it is unlikely that the stone ridge slightly later than the Tao Temple is the Yellow Emperor's family, and at best it can only be a descendant of the Yellow Emperor's side branches, otherwise it is impossible to explain that the historical facts of the Yaodu Pingyang can be truthfully recorded, and the stone ridge of the same period as the Tao Temple, there is no written record that the Yellow Emperor or the direct descendants of the Yellow Emperor built their capital here.
Not only that, compared with the Taosi culture, which is only limited to the south of Jin, Shiyuan has formed a group of two ** settlements centered on the Shiyuan site, and the Shiyuan culture has also broken through the limitations of northern Shaanxi in the process and expanded rapidly to the south.
First of all, from the Yangshao culture to the early Longshan culture, Shicheng was mainly distributed in the west bank of the Yellow River in central Inner Mongolia and northern Shaanxi, but in the middle and late Longshan culture, Shicheng appeared in large numbers along the Balwei River, a tributary of the Yellow River to the west, and the overall distribution direction was from northeast to southwest.
Secondly, in the process of moving south, the Shiyuan ethnic group is still building stone cities, which shows at least two points, one is that the Shiyuan ethnic group takes agriculture as their main livelihood and needs the protection of the city, and the other is that there are strong enemies around, otherwise there is no need for the Shiyuan people to spend a lot of manpower and material resources to build stone cities along the way.
According to this migration route, the Shiyun people should eventually migrate to the Weishui valley in Shaanxi, which is also more suitable for agriculture than northern Shaanxi, which suffers from dry and cold climates. However, the Erlitou site (known as the late Xia Dynasty Duyi), located in the southeast of Shiyuan, has found a large number of Shiyuan-style jade, and the typical artifacts of Erlitou, dragon-shaped ware and Yazhang, have been found in Shiyuan, and Yazhang has not yet been found in Taosi.
This shows that many of the cultural factors in Erlitou came from the more distant Shiyuan ethnic group, rather than the Tao Temple, which is known as Yaodu. After migrating from the northeast to the southwest, the Shiyuan ethnic group suddenly turned to the southeast and entered the Heluo area through the southwest of Shanxi.
This also explains why the Zhou ethnic group in Guanzhong is believed to be related to the Shiyuan ethnic group in northern Shaanxi, but the pre-Zhou culture is found in large numbers in Shanxi. The destruction of the site of Jinnan Tao Temple has been shown by many archaeological evidences to be committed by the Qi ethnic group. If we combine the analysis of "Danzhu, the son of Emperor Houjifang (referring to Emperor Yao)" recorded in the "Historical Records", it seems that it was the ancestors of the Zhou people who moved south to break through the Tao Temple.
And the beautiful scene of Yao Shunyu Chanrang has been confirmed by archaeology to be fictional, which is full of violence and power grabbing. The collapse of the Tao Tang clan just paved the way for the Xia Hou clan to break out of control and establish a new Xia regime.
Not only that, but even the Shang Dynasty after the Xia Dynasty was also a descendant of a group of people. According to archaeological discoveries, the Xianshang culture (Xiaqiyuan culture) was formed by the eastward march of the Jinzhong culture into Handan and the fusion with the local Jiangou culture.
It can be seen that the establishment of the three dynasties of the Xia, Shang and Zhou dynasties all had the direct participation or indirect influence of the Shiyuan ethnic group, so it is not difficult to understand that the matrilineal genetic relationship between the Shiyuan population and the modern northern Han population north of the Huai River in the Qinling Mountains is closer than that of other ancient populations in the Yellow River Basin.
There was a period of time on the Internet where netizens laughed at themselves, and some netizens watched the perfect drama beating up the supervillain of the United States from the Soviet Union to China, and exclaimed, "Sit up in shock in a dying illness, the great powers are actually myself?" ”
For a long time in the past, under the influence of the Central Plains centrism, we often regarded the civilization of "the outer land" like Shiyuan as a collateral or other line of Chinese civilization, and even speculated from the geographical location of Shiyuan that the Shiyuan people were the later ghost people and the fierce rivals of China.
But facts have proved that Shiyuan culture is one of the main bodies of Chinese civilization, and it is also the direct ancestor of the Han nationality in the modern north.
Since the era of Laohushan culture, the whole East Asian region has entered a dry and cold period, which is very fatal to the ethnic groups with agriculture as the main industry, which is also the direct reason why the Laohushan culture entered northern Shaanxi and became the Shiyuan type and Zhukaigou type, and the Shiyuan ethnic group continued to move south, which was also directly affected by the climate.
Judging from the distribution of Shicheng, the Shiyun people migrated south along the Yellow River and the Balwei River, a tributary of the western part of the Yellow River, perhaps to facilitate agricultural production. At the same time as the Shiyuan people migrated southward, the Qijia cultural groups in Shaanxi and Gansu also migrated to the southeast due to the influence of the climate, and the collision between the two cultural groups in order to compete for the living area was the reason why the Shiyuan migration route turned to the southeast.
Therefore, after going south, the Shiyuan ethnic group and the later Erlitou culture all carried the figure of Qijia culture.
The question of the origin of Chinese civilization is not only an academic issue, but also a major event that affects the hearts of hundreds of millions of people. Especially in the case of contradictions between ancient historical records and archaeological discoveries, the origin of Chinese civilization in pluralism and unity is becoming more and more confusing. If you are also interested in this topic, then I recommend reading the book "The Origin of Chinese Civilization" written by Professor Han Jianye, which may be able to solve many of your puzzles. Genuine**, you can click the link below to purchase. List of high-quality authors