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01

Mysterious carvings and evidence of human sacrifice uncovered in ancient city

© Photograph by Ben Sherlock, National Geographic

Crowned by a stepped pyramid more than 200 feet tall, a 4,300-year-old fortress city known as Shimao is challenging traditional narratives about China’s early history.

The stones didn’t give up their secrets easily. For decades, villagers in the dust-blown hills of China’s Loess Plateau believed that the crumbling rock walls near their homes were part of the Great Wall. It made sense. Remnants of the ancient barrier zigzag through this arid region inside the northern loop of the Yellow River, marking the frontier of Chinese rule stretching back more than 2,000 years.

But one detail was curiously out of place: Locals, and then looters, began finding in the rubble pieces of jade, some fashioned into discs and blades and scepters. Jade is not indigenous to this northernmost part of Shaanxi Province—the nearest source is almost a thousand miles away—and it was not a known feature of the Great Wall. Why was it showing up in abundance in this barren region so close to the Ordos Desert?

© Photograph by Ben Sherlock, National Geographic

Recently unearthed stone carvings “may have endowed the stepped pyramid with special religious power,” the archaeologists reported.

When a team of Chinese archaeologists came to investigate the conundrum several years ago, they began to unearth something wondrous and puzzling. The stones were not part of the Great Wall but the ruins of a magnificent fortress city. The ongoing dig has revealed more than six miles of protective walls surrounding a 230-foot-high pyramid and an inner sanctum with painted murals, jade artifacts—and gruesome evidence of human sacrifice.

© Photograph by Li Min, UCLA

Fortified walls eight feet thick and six miles long ringed the city. The ruins were first discovered decades ago but were thought to be part of the Great Wall of China until recent discoveries revealed that they are much older.

Before excavations were suspended earlier this year due to the coronavirus pandemic, archaeologists uncovered 70 stunning relief sculptures in stone—serpents, monsters, and half-human beasts that resemble later Bronze Age iconography in China.

Even more astonishing: Carbon-dating determined that parts of Shimao, as the site is called (its original name is unknown), date back 4,300 years, nearly 2,000 years before the oldest section of the Great Wall—and 500 years before Chinese civilization took root on the Central Plains, several hundred miles to the south.

Shimao flourished in this seemingly remote region for nearly half a millennium, from around 2300 B.C. to 1800 B.C. Then, suddenly and mysteriously, it was abandoned. (Discover a fortress in Sri Lanka that was swallowed by the jungle.)

None of the ancient texts that have helped guide Chinese archaeology mention an ancient city so far north of the so-called “cradle of Chinese civilization,” much less one of such size, complexity, and intense interaction with outside cultures. Shimao is now the largest known Neolithic settlement in China—its 1,000-acre expanse is about 25 percent bigger than New York City’s Central Park—with art and technology that came from the northern steppe and would influence future Chinese dynasties.

Together with recent discoveries at other prehistoric sites nearby and along the coast, Shimao is forcing historians to rethink the beginnings of Chinese civilization—expanding their understanding of the geographical locations and outside influences of its earliest cultures.

“Shimao is one of the most important archaeological discoveries of this century,” says Sun Zhouyong, director of the Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Archaeology and leader of the dig at Shimao. “It gives us a new way of looking at the development of China’s early civilization.”

Designed for danger© Photograph by Rachel Vaknin, National Geographic

Shimao is the largest known Stone Age settlement in China, and only a small portion of the site has been excavated. Archaeologists expect to make many more discoveries.

The first impression of Shimao, even as a partially excavated site in the barren hills above the Tuwei River, is of a city designed to face constant danger. The city was built in a conflict zone, a borderland dominated for thousands of years by warfare between herders of the northern steppe and farmers of the central plains.

To protect themselves from violent rivals, the Shimao elites molded their oblong 20-tiered pyramid on the highest of those hills. The structure, visible from every point of the city, is about half the height of Egypt’s Great Pyramid at Giza, which was built around the same time (2250 B.C.). But its base is four times larger, and the Shimao elites protected themselves further by inhabiting the top tier of the platform, which included a 20-acre palatial complex with its own water reservoir, craft workshops, and, most likely, ritual temples.

Radiating out from Shimao’s central pyramid were miles of inner and outer perimeter walls, an embryonic urban design that has been echoed in Chinese cities through the ages. The walls alone required 125,000 cubic meters of stone, equal in volume to 50 Olympic swimming pools—a huge undertaking in a Neolithic society whose population likely ranged between 10,000 and 20,000. The sheer size of the project leads archaeologists to believe that Shimao commanded the loyalty—and labor—of smaller satellite towns that have recently been discovered in its orbit.

Ancient China From Above: China's Pompeii

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More than 70 stone towns from the same Neolithic era, known as the Longshan period, have now been unearthed in northern Shaanxi province. Ten of them are in the Tuwei river basin, where Shimao is located. “These satellite villages or towns are like moons circling around the Shimao site,” Sun says. “Together they laid a solid social foundation for the early state formation at Shimao.”

Shimao’s fortifications are astonishing not just for their size but also for their ingenuity. The defensive system included barbicans (gates flanked by towers), baffle gates (allowing only one-way entry), and bastions (a projecting part of the wall allowing defensive fire in multiple directions). It also employed a “mamian” (“horse-face”) structure whose angles drew attackers into an area where defenders could pummel them from three sides—a design that would become a staple of Chinese defensive architecture. (Here's why ancient fortifications in Europe had melted stone walls.)

Inside the stone walls, Sun’s team found another unexpected innovation: wooden beams used as reinforcement. Carbon-dated to 2300 B.C., the still-intact cypress beams represented a method of construction that scholars previously thought had only begun in the Han Dynasty—more than 2,000 years later.

Grisly discovery

The most grisly discovery came underneath the city’s eastern wall: 80 human skulls clustered in six pits—with no skeletons attached. (The two pits closest to the East Gate, the city’s principal entrance, contained exactly 24 skulls each.) The skulls’ number and placement suggest a ritual beheading during the laying of the wall’s foundation—the earliest known example of human sacrifice in Chinese history. Forensic scientists determined that almost all of the victims were young girls, most likely prisoners who belonged to a rival group.

“The scale of ritual violence observed at Shimao was unprecedented in early China,” says Li Min, an archaeologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has visited and written extensively about Shimao. The skulls at Shimao foreshadowed the massive human sacrifice that became what Li calls “a defining attribute of Shang civilization” many centuries later (from around 1600 to 1046 B.C.) before succeeding dynasties put an end to the practice.

The skulls are just one indication that the East Gate marked the entrance to a different world. Anyone walking across the threshold—above the buried sacrificial pits—would have been awed by more immediately visible signs. Several stone blocks in the high terrace walls were carved with lozenge designs, making them appear like enormous eyes gazing down at the East Gate. Wedged into the stone walls at regular intervals were thousands of pieces of black and dark green jade, shimmering ornaments that served both to ward off evil and to project the power and wealth of Shimao elites. The abundance of jade artifacts suggests that Shimao, with no source of its own, imported large quantities from distant trading partners.

Despite its seeming remoteness today, Shimao was not insulated from the outside world. It exchanged ideas, technology, and goods with a wide range of other cultures, from the Altai steppe to the north to coastal regions near the Yellow Sea.

“What is significant is that Shimao, along with many other areas, shows that China’s civilization has many roots and does not emerge just from the growth in the Central Plains on the middle Yellow River,” says Jessica Rawson, a professor of Chinese Art and Archaeology at the University of Oxford. “Several features were taken from the world beyond even today’s northern China—for example, stone structures, that have more relation to the steppe than to the Central Plains. Other features are herded animals for subsistence, oxen and sheep and metallurgy. These are actually very important technologies that China adopted and incorporated seamlessly into their culture.”

Many artifacts found at Shimao could only have come from distant lands. Besides the jade, archaeologists also found the remains of alligator skins, which must have come from a swampier region much farther south. Alligator-skin drums were likely used during ritual ceremonies, one sign of the vital role music played in Shimao palace life. (A 1,150-year-old tomb in China reveals first evidence for polo—on donkeys.)

Another discovery flummoxed Sun and his team: 20 identical pieces of bone, thin, smooth, and curved. The archaeologists guessed that these were combs or hairpins, until a musical scholar deduced that the bones were the earliest examples of a primitive reed instrument known in Chinese as the mouth reed and more colloquially as the Jew’s harp.

“Shimao is the birthplace of the mouth reed,” says Sun, noting that the instrument spread to more than 100 ethnic groups across the world. “It is an important discovery that provides valuable clues to explore the early flows of population and culture.”

Mysteries and clues

Only a small fraction of Shimao has been excavated so far, so the discoveries keep coming. Along with the stone carvings uncovered last year, archaeologists found evidence of human busts and statues that were once set into the walls around the East Gate. We are only beginning to understand what the carvings might signify, says UCLA’s Li Min, but the anthropomorphic representations are “a very innovative and rare attempt.”

So much about Shimao remains cloaked in mystery, including its name. Archaeologists are still trying to understand how its economy functioned, how it interacted with other prehistoric cultures, and whether its elites possessed a writing system. “That would solve a long-standing mystery,” says Sun.

There are some clues, however, to why Shimao was abandoned after 500 years. It wasn’t earthquake, flood, or plague. A war might have helped drive them out, but scientists see more evidence that climate change played a pivotal role.

In the third millennium B.C., when Shimao was founded, a relatively warm and wet climate drew an expanding population into the Loess Plateau. Historical records show a rapid shift from 2000 to 1700 B.C. to a drier and cooler climate. Lakes dried up, forests disappeared, deserts encroached, and the people of Shimao migrated to parts unknown.

The once-distant tongue of the Ordos Desert now laps at the banks of the Tuwei River, just below the entrance to Shimao. The ancient site is shrouded in dust and rocks and silence. Yet, after 4,300 years, one of the world’s oldest cities is no longer lost to history, no longer abandoned. Its stones have given up a precious load of secrets, challenging our understanding of the earliest period of Chinese civilization. Many more revelations are sure to come.

Gallery: Incredible new secrets of the world’s ancient wonders revealed (Love Exploring)

02

Check out the technosignature on that planet

IDEAS

By Jacob Haqq-MisraUpdated August 19, 2020, 6:19 p.m.

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The question “are we alone?” is perhaps older than civilization itself, but recent advances in technology have shifted speculation about extraterrestrial life from the domain of philosophy and into the realm of science. Steady improvements in the ability of telescopes to peer into the atmospheres of planets around other stars are enabling scientists to contemplate the ways that life could be detected across the vast reaches of space.

One new strategy for spotting telltale evidence of extraterrestrial life is to look for “technosignatures.”

It’s a twist on an earlier method of scanning space for evidence of the simplest forms of life. For example, our own atmosphere is notable for the simultaneous presence of oxygen and methane. Together, these molecules would destroy one another through rapid chemical reactions, but they remain in Earth’s atmosphere because both methane and oxygen are continually produced by living things: plants, animals, and microorganisms. This interaction between life and the planet suggests just one possible “biosignature” that we might look for on other planets.

But now I and other researchers intend to look as well for signs of technology. After all, many geologists think that the effects of human technology on our environment will be preserved in the rock record, demarcating an epoch of planetary history when large-scale farming began, materials such as plastic arose, and nuclear testing became feasible. Other industrial activities have altered the chemical composition of our atmosphere, such as the depletion of ozone by chlorofluorocarbons or the acceleration of climate change from fossil fuel burning. The planet itself is encircled by orbiting satellites, along with a cloud of debris from the broken remnants of failed or decommissioned satellites. Changes like these all are indicative of a new phase in our planet’s evolution in which technology is expanding the biosphere.

And so, just as the history of life on Earth motivates the search for biosignatures, Earth’s trajectory as a planet with an emerging sphere of technology suggests an analogous search for “technosignatures” in other planetary systems. Detecting gases like chlorofluorocarbons on another planet would be strong evidence of extraterrestrial industry. An extraterrestrial satellite belt much thicker than ours could also be detectable. A planet that covers its surface with solar panels or builds large orbiting solar collectors could conceivably be detected with a large enough telescope. The challenge of how to best identify, categorize, and prioritize scenarios such as these remains an important problem in the emerging science of technosignatures.

As we think about possible trajectories for our own civilization, the emerging scientific effort to understand and search for technosignatures may also help us better understand our future.

Jacob Haqq-Misra is a research scientist with the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science. Follow him on Twitter @haqqmisra. He recently hosted a NASA-sponsored workshop about technosignatures; posters and talks are available at technoclimes.org.

03

How to make civilization great again

You can always count on Americans to do the right thing, after they’ve tried everything else. — Winston Churchill

During World War II the U.S. and Great Britain were not always on the same page about how to fight an unprecedented totalitarian enemy. But the allies worked out their differences, won the war, and founded a new world order, led by the United States.

Now, 75 years later, the rest of the world is amazed and bewildered that America failed to do the right thing when facing a pandemic and is saddled with a divisive and dysfunctional government.

Larry Struck

There’s nothing new about people getting things wrong in a time of crisis. During the 1918 flu epidemic many citizens refused to wear masks but eventually relented as the crisis dragged on. Or consider this description of human behavior during the Black Death in 14th-century Italy when many believed that “the surest medicine for such an evil disease was to drink heavily, enjoy life’s pleasures, and go about singing and having fun, satisfying their appetites by any means available, while laughing at everything.”

Are we really acting differently from the supposedly ignorant and superstitious Middle Ages even though something called science has changed the world in the meantime?

Whatever the cause of our ongoing calamity — psychological impairment, mass delusion, abysmal leadership or just widespread nastiness — let’s agree that many problems need to be fixed, ASAP, to return to something like a stable nation. But how?

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A recognized guide

From ancient history there has been a recognized guide to political and ethical issues. The Greek philosopher Aristotle provided benchmarks, or what can be called best practices, that have been respected for more than 2,000 years. Some of them could be useful now. That’s not to say there aren’t many other traditions or cultural avatars with valuable advice. But let’s consider his particular ancient wisdom. (A good guide to his ethics is “Aristotle’s Way,” by British scholar Edith Hall.)

Wikimedia Commons

Roman copy in marble of a Greek bronze bust of Aristotle by Lysippos, c. 330 BC, with modern alabaster mantle

When faced with problems or a difficult situation, we need to make decisions about what to do. Of course we always have the option of avoiding real problems or pretending they don’t exist, which usually leads to things getting worse, sometimes unbelievably worse. But let’s take the adult course of action and follow these time-tested guidelines for decision making:

Don’t be hasty in your deliberation. Do you have all the facts, or even care about them? Impulse decisions can be satisfying but often wrong. Take your time if you can; sleep on it. Both fast and slow deliberation work together for best results.

Verify all information. Is your Internet source reliable, or does your co-worker’s friend really know the truth about the coming market crash? You should be skeptical and double check any dubious information.

Consult and listen to expert advisers. You don’t know everything. Try to get the best information you can from as many sources as possible, not just the ones you agree with. Otherwise something vital could be missed.

Consider everyone’s point of view. Decisions, especially momentous ones, can affect many people, not just you or your buddies. Try to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and see their world, especially those less fortunate.

Look at past experience. Has there been a situation like this before? If it went well, learn from that. If not, avoid those previous mistakes. Remember that there is a past (history), not just moment to moment events.

Think about different kinds of outcomes. What are the odds: most and least likely? Things may not go the way you expect, so you need to anticipate other outcomes. Remember to take into account luck, probability, and the unknown.

Notice that these rules do not exactly rise to the level of rocket-science difficulty. In fact most of us use these guidelines one way or another all the time without a second thought in doing our work, managing households or raising families. These unspoken rules of thumb are something that we learn and practice as the lessons become habitual.

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Considered practical knowledge

Aristotle argued that these useful habits lead to virtue and a good life, although not everyone follows that path or anything like it. Taken together, his suggestions may seem to us like a fancy form of self-help but were actually considered practical knowledge, as opposed to formal logic or pie-in-the-sky theory. With all our current problems and chaos, it’s a prize irony that we Americans have such a reputation for a can-do spirit and “getting things done.” Expect that to change.

Seeing national and local leaders who have avoided these common-sense fundamentals, or turned malicious, is both remarkable and mystifying. We wonder and shake our heads over how much important work is not getting done, or done in the worst ways possible for lack of this basic civilizing toolkit. That’s when trains go off the rails and damage assessment begins.

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Having seen the steep downside of “shaking things up” with no particular plan, we can hope for a slow recovery and better role models as leaders. Life itself provides enough stress without mere citizenship being a recipe for more. Most of us are ready for a time when we don’t have to feel apologetic about this country, or see more signs like this one posted outside a restaurant in London:

ALL AMERICANS MUST BE ACCOMPANIED BY AN ADULT

Larry Struck is a writer and former expat now based in Edina.

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