OTHER CENTERS OF CIVILIZATION 
fishing in the streams well-filled with fish, turtles, and other 
creatures. These Neolithic Chinese seem to have been 
organized in clans tracing descent through mothers in- 
stead of fathers and to have practiced a sort of nature 
worship accompanied, as so often elsewhere, by human 
sacrifice. 
Near the very end of the New Stone Age there appeared 
in northern China a type of painted pottery quite differ- 
ent from the coarse kind already known. This type of 
ware occurs also in various other parts of the world. In 
some regions, as in the southwestern United States and 
in Peru, there can be no doubt of its independent develop- 
ment. In the Old World, however, painted pottery has 
been found, together with a whole group of other culture 
elements, along a belt extending from China on the east to 
Europe on the west. In this case an ultimate common 
origin seems possible. As one recent investigator has put 
it, the idea, at least, of painted pottery was in the air, al- 
though i in each locality i it underwent a largely independent 
development. Ancient man in China did not adopt it 
very widely and in time its use died out, while the older 
and much more widespread coarse gray ware continued 
to be made down into historic times. 
The agricultural peoples inhabiting central Asia be- 
tween 3,000 and 4,000 years ago had a well-developed 
Bronze Age culture, and it seems most likely that from 
them the ancient Chinese learned the use of that metal. 
The archeology of southern Siberia and Turkestan is only 
beginning to be investigated, mainly by Russian scholars 
and explorers; but these have already discovered enough 
to suggest, at least, how the ancient Chinese came to pos- 
sess a civilization so strikingly similar in its fundamentals 
to those which once flourished in western Asia. 
It seems clear that the Chinese, after independently de- 
veloping a high type of New Stone Age culture with a 
social organization composed of chiefs, nobles, and com- 
mon people, acquired from their neighbors to the northwest 
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