Located in Jiahu village of Luohe city, Central China's Henan province, Jiahu site, once a Neolithic settlement some 7,500 to 9,000 years ago, covers an area of 55 thousand square meters, where abundant well-preserved cultural remains have been unearthed. The unearthed relics surpass its counterparts of the same period in China separately in number, variety, craftsmanship and cultural connotation. Jiahu witnessed the first cultural peak of East Asia in the past tens of thousands of years. Although sharing the same value with the ancient cultures fostered by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in West Asia during the same period, Jiahu has been taken as the brightest star.
Since 1983, over 6,000 cultural relics have been discovered successively, including pottery wares, stone implements, bone tools, horns, teeth, etc., after 8 rounds of archaeological excavations in about 3,000-square-meter site. Here China's earliest musical instrument with 7 sound holes, tripod-shaped wares, turquoise ornaments and domestically-cultivated soybeans were unearthed as well as China's one of the earliest forms of writing and one of the earliest wines. Jiahu is proved to be one of the birthplaces of the earliest animal domestication, fish breeding, rice planting, textile industry, primitive religion and divination in ancient China, therefore it has registered in both China's 100 major archaeological discoveries of the 20th century and China's 100 major archaeological discoveries in the past century. (Zhao Hanqing Yang Jiaxin and Zhang Yahan)
