The AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
VOLUME IA XV, NUMBER 1 OCTOBER 1969
The Loess and the Origin of Chinese Agriculture
PING-TI Ho
EW problems in human history are more fundamental and challenging than the origins of agriculture. It was cereal agriculture, probably more than any-thing ehe, that gave rise to the first civilizations in both the Old and New World
The origins of agriculture in Mesopotamia and Meso-America have been inten-sively studied by archaeologists and scientists of many disciplines, for all except a handful of extreme diffusionists have conceded that these areas were the two independent nuclei from which agriculture and early civilizations developed and spread throughout the hemispheres.
Because of the multifarious data concerning the origin of Chinese agriculture, however, there is reason to believe that, in so far as theories of the genesis of culture are concerned, China may well hold as crucial a position as do Mesopotamia and Meso-America.
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