RECONSTRUCTING MANUFACTURING TECHNOLOGY AND TECHNOLOGICAL ORGANISATION AT THE QIJIA JUE EARRING WORKSHOP IN WESTERN ZHOU (1046-771 BC) CHINA

This paper discusses the pattern of Qijia jue production in the Western Zhou dynasty at the predynastic capital site of Zhouyuan, from the aspects of manufacturing technology and technological organisation. The Qijia workshop exemplifies the use of natural resources in the local environment, in an operation based on principles of production efficiency, from raw material procurement to final manufacture. The reconstruction of manufacturing technology shows that jue production did not require much technological investment or complicated facilities, and that it could have been carried out under a "holistic" organisation of technology, where each working group was responsible for the full range of manufacturing steps from preforming to final refining

Ancient Genomes Reveal the Evolutionary History and Origin of Cashmere-Producing Goats in China

Goats are one of the most widespread farmed animals across the world; however, their migration route to East Asia and local evolutionary history remain poorly understood. Here, we sequenced 27 ancient Chinese goat genomes dating from the Late Neolithic period to the Iron Age. We found close genetic affinities between ancient and modern Chinese goats, demonstrating their genetic continuity. We found that Chinese goats originated from the eastern regions around the Fertile Crescent, and we estimated that the ancestors of Chinese goats diverged from this population in the Chalcolithic period. Modern Chinese goats were divided into a northern and a southern group, coinciding with the most prominent climatic division in China, and two genes related to hair follicle development, FGF5 and EDA2R, were highly divergent between these populations. We identified a likely causal de novo deletion near FGF5 in northern Chinese goats that increased to high frequency over time, whereas EDA2R harbored standing variation dating to the Neolithic. Our findings add to our understanding of the genetic composition and local evolutionary process of Chinese goats

Earliest "Domestic" Cats in China Identified as Leopard Cat (Prionailurus bengalensis).

The ancestor of all modern domestic cats is the wildcat, Felis silvestris lybica, with archaeological evidence indicating it was domesticated as early as 10,000 years ago in South-West Asia. A recent study, however, claims that cat domestication also occurred in China some 5,000 years ago and involved the same wildcat ancestor (F. silvestris). The application of geometric morphometric analyses to ancient small felid bones from China dating between 5,500 to 4,900 BP, instead reveal these and other remains to be that of the leopard cat (Prionailurus bengalensis). These data clearly indicate that the origins of a human-cat 'domestic' relationship in Neolithic China began independently from South-West Asia and involved a different wild felid species altogether. The leopard cat's 'domestic' status, however, appears to have been short-lived--its apparent subsequent replacement shown by the fact that today all domestic cats in China are genetically related to F. silvestris

Modern distribution of wild felid species, archaeological site location and mandible shape relationship between modern wild felid species and domestic cat.

<p><b>(A)</b>, Modern Old World distribution of the different wild cat subspecies (<i>Felis silvestris</i>) and the leopard cat (<i>Prionailurus bengalensis</i>), and location of the three Middle-Late Neolithic sites of the Shaanxi and Henan Provinces (China) analyzed in this paper: 1, Quanhucun, 2, Wuzhuangguoliang, 3, Xiawanggang (Redrawn from [<a href="http://maps.iucnredlist.org/map.html?id=60354712" target="_blank">http://maps.iucnredlist.org/map.html?id=60354712</a>] and [<a href="http://maps.iucnredlist.org/map.html?id=18146" target="_blank">http://maps.iucnredlist.org/map.html?id=18146</a>] under a CC BY license, with permission from IUCN Red List of Threatened Species; <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0147295#pone.0147295.s011" target="_blank">S1 Text</a>.; CAD I. Carrère); <b>(B)</b>, Phenotypic relationship (unrooted neighbour joining tree) built on mandible shape distances between modern domestic cat (<i>F</i>. <i>catus</i>), leopard cat (<i>P</i>. <i>bengalensis</i>) and the two relevant sub-species of wild cat (<i>F</i>. <i>s</i>. <i>silvestris; F</i>. <i>s</i>. <i>lybica</i>) from our analyses.</p

Whole-genome resequencing reveals world-wide ancestry and adaptive introgression events of domesticated cattle in East Asia

Cattle domestication and the complex histories of East Asian cattle breeds warrant further investigation. Through analysing the genomes of 49 modern breeds and eight East Asian ancient samples, worldwide cattle are consistently classified into five continental groups based on Y-chromosome haplotypes and autosomal variants. We find that East Asian cattle populations are mainly composed of three distinct ancestries, including an earlier East Asian taurine ancestry that reached China at least ~3.9 kya, a later introduced Eurasian taurine ancestry, and a novel Chinese indicine ancestry that diverged from Indian indicine approximately 36.6–49.6 kya. We also report historic introgression events that helped domestic cattle from southern China and the Tibetan Plateau achieve rapid adaptation by acquiring ~2.93% and ~1.22% of their genomes from banteng and yak, respectively. Our findings provide new insights into the evolutionary history of cattle and the importance of introgression in adaptation of cattle to new environmental challenges in East Asia

Popular culture in the making of anti-imperialist and nationalist sentiments in Sichuan

Existing Western scholarship on the rights recovery movement in Sichuan mainly focuses on the role played by elites. This article argues that popular culture, in the form of folk stories, songs, and children’s primers, also contributed to that movement by shaping and expressing popular anti-imperialist attitudes. Its analysis of primers available in late Qing Sichuan and popular stories about the activities of foreigners prevalent in the early 1900s serves to reveal a rich local cultural milieu of time-nurtured anti-imperialist sentiment among common people, which broadly influenced local political action. The protests over the Jiangbei mining concession encompassed both elite and ordinary people, although each group understood the issue differently