EASTERN ASIA — BISHOP 



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The domestic fowl, not identified on Chinese Neolithic sites but 

 known by Shang times, must have come from India; for its wild 

 ancestor, the red jungle fowl {Gallus ferrugineus s. hankiva), occurs 

 in that country but not in China. From India, too, seems to have 

 come the basic stock of the domestic water buffalo.^'' 



Moreover, not only did the ancient Chinese acquire most of their 

 domestic animals as culture loans from abroad; but they failed to 

 make as full use of them as did, for example, the ancient peoples of 

 the Near East. Thus, though a dairy economy and the use of the 

 ox-drawn plow had both long been known in the latter quarter, the one 

 trait was never adopted by the Chinese, the other not until around 

 the fourth century B. C.'^ Again, though the Chinese have had sheep 



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from late prehistoric times onward, unlike the peoples of the Near 

 East they have never made or used woolen cloth. 



China's cultivated plants likewise have been derived largely from 

 other lands. Millet, rice, and sorghum (kao-liang or "giant millet") 

 came from India, just as did sugarcane and cotton later on. Wheat 

 reached China about the beginning of her belated Bronze Age, from 

 the West. Similarly (though of course not until long afterward) 



"The Chinese water buffalo shows far less modification under domestication than do 

 the Indian breeds. It would seem therefore to have received a large infusion of the blood 

 of the wild form which we Isnow once occurred in China. 



^ On the latter point, see my paper, Orisin and early diffusion of the traction-plough. 

 Antiquity, vol. 10, pp. 261-281, 1936; ref. to p. 278. The article has been reprinted 

 in the Ann. Rep. Smithsonian Inst, for 1937, pp. 131-547, 1938; ref. on p. 545. 



