The prehistoric era in human history is a long period before the invention of writing.Prehistoric ancestors created prehistoric culture and laid the foundation of civilization.What was prehistoric times like?What is the mystery of prehistoric culture?In ancient China, scholars have conducted explorations. In some works of scholars in the Han and Tang Dynasties, fragments of legends and texts about human activities in the prehistoric era can be read, including some speculative conclusions of the authors, some of which are very insightful.However, the ancients knew very little about the general laws of prehistoric cultural development and the main cultural achievements created by prehistoric ancestors, and it was impossible to have a systematic and scientific understanding.

The scientific understanding of prehistoric society and prehistoric culture came after the birth of modern archaeology.As an important branch of archaeology, prehistoric archaeology is a discipline that specializes in the study of prehistoric societies and their cultures through the investigation and excavation of prehistoric human remains and relics.From the perspective of material and cultural history, archaeologists divide the development of human society into several stages of development: the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age.Generally speaking, the Stone Age is equivalent to the prehistoric era, and prehistoric archeology is synonymous with Stone Age archeology.Later, after long-term research by prehistoric archaeologists, the Stone Age was divided into four stages: Paleolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic, and Chalcolithic, forming a relatively complete research system.

After the divergence of human beings from ancient apes, it took about two to three million years of development until the appearance of writing.The Paleolithic Age is the first stage of development experienced by human beings, and it is also the stage with the slowest development speed and the longest experience. It is roughly from the appearance of humans to about 10,000 years ago.The production tools of this era are marked by stone tools. Human beings learned to use fire, gathered, fished and hunted as important means of life, and created the most primitive works of art.Around 10,000 years ago, it was the Mesolithic Age with a short development time. The small stone tools obtained by indirect strikes were used as tools, and the economic and lifestyle generally inherited the tradition of the Paleolithic Age.The emergence of agriculture and animal husbandry, the emergence of polished stone tools, pottery and textile technology indicate that the Neolithic Age has arrived, and the most important sign is the invention of farming.The time span of the Neolithic Age is about 5,000 years or more.When the red copper smelting technology was invented, red copper utensils were made, but the main tools were still polished stone tools. This is the era of copper and stone.Going one step further, we arrived at the Bronze Age, and human society began a splendid civilization era.It should be noted that some researchers still hold objections to whether the "Mesolithic" and "copperstone" are two independent stages of development in the prehistoric era. In essence, they are two transitional stages with a short age. Its importance cannot be underestimated.

Prehistoric archaeological research in China started relatively late. More than half a century after Europeans first discovered Paleolithic and ape skull fossils, foreign scholars found some Neolithic sites in the Yellow River Basin in the 1920s, and then Chinese and foreign scholars jointly excavated Beijing. The Paleolithic cultural site in Zhoukoudian, and the discovery of Peking Man skull fossils, this is the beginning of Chinese prehistoric archaeological research. Over the past decades, especially in the last 30 to 40 years, more than 200 Paleolithic sites and thousands of Neolithic sites have been discovered on China's 9.6 million square kilometers of land. There are as many as four or five hundred places.Due to the differences in time and geographical distribution, these prehistoric cultural sites present different cultural features. According to their characteristics, archaeologists distinguish some different cultural communities and name them with typical representative site names. , called "so-and-so culture".More than 60 prehistoric cultures have been discovered and named in China, such as the famous Yangshao Culture and Longshan Culture.

The naming of prehistoric cultures usually goes through a series of surveys, excavations and researches on similar sites, and chronology is one of the main contents of the research.According to the general rule, in the excavation of a certain site, the accumulation of lower cultures is earlier than the accumulation of upper cultures. This method of determining relative ages based on stratigraphic relations is widely used in field archeology, and is called "stratigraphy". , is one of the basic methods of archaeology.In addition, in comparing the connotations of different sites and determining their age, a method called "typology" in archeology is used.This method is to classify and compare the relics and relics, determine their standard types, and find out their evolution sequence.The positions of relics and relics of different shapes on this sequence list are their relative chronological positions, and the natural ages that appear earlier are earlier, and vice versa.Typology is an important method for judging the similarities and differences of cultural connotations at different sites. If certain types of artifacts and relics can be found at different sites, it not only indicates that their ages are similar, but also indicates that they are cultural communities created by the same human group.This kind of community that represents the same era, concentrates in a certain region, and has certain local characteristics is an independent archaeological culture.One of the most typical site names can be chosen to name this archaeological culture, and it is usually customary to choose the name of the site discovered first.

With the continuous development of prehistoric archaeology, modern science and technology are gradually being applied to various aspects of archaeological research, such as surveying, restoration, identification, dating, etc. It is unimaginable without scientific and technological methods.Especially natural science dating technology, which can give the absolute age data of relics and relics, has had an immeasurable impact on the study of prehistoric archaeological culture.At present, dating methods that have been applied in archaeology include paleomagnetic dating, radiocarbon dating, thermoluminescence dating, fluorine content dating of bone fossils, tree ring dating, amino acid racemization method dating, uranium series method dating, potassium - Argon dating, etc.Among them, the most widely used and most effective is the radiocarbon dating method, which uses the principle of the continuous decay of carbon-14 in biological remains to determine the age.Its basic principle is that cosmic rays react with atoms in the earth's atmosphere to produce an isotope carbon-14 that is different in weight from ordinary carbon atoms.The concentration of carbon-14 in organisms is in balance with the concentration of carbon-14 in the atmosphere, but carbon-14 cannot be replenished after death, and gradually decays and decreases.By measuring the degree of carbon-14 reduction in a dead organism, the age of its death can be calculated.By comparing and correcting the radiocarbon measurement results with the tree rings, more realistic age data can be obtained.After this method was applied to archaeology, the chronology of prehistoric archaeology was established on a reliable basis based on absolute age, which is called a revolution in prehistoric archaeology.Thousands of carbon-14 dating data have been measured in China, which has laid a solid foundation for the establishment of a chronological system of Chinese prehistoric culture from the late Paleolithic age to the Neolithic age.With such absolute chronological data and relative chronological relationship, we can easily arrange the sequence list of prehistoric cultural development in various places, and can also purposefully search for and supplement the missing links in this sequence list.

The prehistoric cultures discovered in China include the Shanxi Xihoudu culture of 1.8 million years ago belonging to the early Paleolithic age, the 1.7 million-year-old Yuanmou culture of Yunnan, and the later Lantian culture of Shaanxi about 1 million years ago. and the Pekingese culture 700,000 to 200,000 years ago; the Shanxi Dingcun culture belonging to the middle Paleolithic age, about 100,000 years ago; Distribution.In the Neolithic Age, there were the earlier Cishan and Peiligang cultures 8,000-7,000 years ago, and the later Hemudu, Yangshao, Dawenkou, Longshan, and Liangzhu cultures.In many areas, a relatively complete sequence of prehistoric cultural development has been established, and the Neolithic cultural sequence in the Yellow River Basin and the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River is the most complete. There are many prehistoric sites discovered and the research is relatively thorough.Of course, there are also some gaps in the sequence table. For example, people know little about the cultural appearance of the early Neolithic Age; in areas other than the Yangtze River and the Yellow River, the sequence of prehistoric culture is very incomplete, or has not been established at all, and the development process is very poor. Not sure.The resolution of these issues needs the efforts of future generations of archaeologists.

Through the excavation of many prehistoric cultural sites, we have a direct and in-depth understanding of the social structure, economic production, daily life, religious beliefs, and artistic activities of human beings in prehistoric times, and thus understand the foundation of Chinese civilization.The splendid oriental prehistoric culture created by our ancestors in ancient times is being presented to us chapter by chapter by the hard work of archaeologists.This long tradition and profound connotation of oriental culture will also be elucidated more completely through in-depth research by archaeologists.