Jiahu: Bone Flutes, Early Signs and Rice Wine in Neolithic China

Jiahu is an early Neolithic village site in Henan Province, central China, occupied from about 7000 to 5700 BC. It has produced the oldest known playable musical instruments from China, flutes made from crane bones, as well as signs incised on tortoise shells and chemical traces of the earliest known fermented drink. These finds make Jiahu one of the most important sites for understanding how music, symbols and early farming developed in East Asia.

Location and discovery

Jiahu lies near the village of the same name in Wuyang County, close to the city of Luohe, on the plain between the Yellow River and the Huai River. In the Neolithic, the area was warmer and wetter than today, with lakes, marshes and woodland that supported fish, waterbirds, deer and wild plants.

The site was first noticed in the early 1960s. Systematic excavations by the Henan Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology took place in several seasons between 1983 and 1987, followed by further work in 2001 and 2013. The archaeologist Zhang Juzhong played a leading role in the excavations and in publishing the results.

Only part of the settlement, which covers roughly 5.5 hectares, has been excavated. Even so, archaeologists have uncovered dozens of house foundations, hundreds of burials, storage pits and pottery kilns, giving a detailed picture of a long-lived farming and foraging community.

The village and its people

Radiocarbon dates divide the occupation into three phases spanning about 1,300 years, from roughly 7000 to 5700 BC. Jiahu is usually linked with the Peiligang culture of the middle Yellow River valley, though some scholars treat it as a separate Jiahu culture because of its southern position and its use of rice.

People lived in small, semi-subterranean houses, some round and some oval, with floors dug into the ground and roofs of timber and thatch. They made red and brown pottery, including jars, bowls and tripod vessels, and used stone tools such as grinding slabs and rollers for processing plants.

Jiahu belonged to a wider world of early villages in northern and central China. Around the same time, communities of the Peiligang and Cishan cultures further north grew millet, while groups in the Yangtze valley to the south used rice. Jiahu’s position between these regions helps explain why it combined features of both, and why archaeologists see it as a meeting point of early Chinese farming traditions.

The burials are especially informative. Most people were buried lying on their backs in rectangular pits, often with pottery, tools or ornaments. Some graves held flutes, tortoise shells and other special items, suggesting that certain individuals had ritual or social roles. Dogs were also buried at the site, sometimes near human graves.

The bone flutes

Jiahu is best known for its flutes. More than thirty have been found, most of them in burials, and several are complete. They are made from the ulnae, or wing bones, of large birds identified as red-crowned cranes, which were common in the marshes of the region.

Most of the flutes have seven finger holes, though earlier examples have five or six holes and later ones up to eight. The makers seem to have marked the positions of holes before drilling them, and on one flute a tiny extra hole appears to have been added to adjust the pitch. This suggests careful attention to musical tone.

In 1999 Zhang Juzhong and colleagues published the flutes in the journal Nature, describing them as the oldest playable musical instruments then known. One well-preserved flute was played and recorded, producing a series of notes that could form a scale. The exact tuning system intended by the makers is still debated. Because each flute was made from a bone of slightly different size, no two produce exactly the same notes, and modern players’ breath and technique also affect the sound. Researchers therefore avoid claiming that the Jiahu people used any particular later Chinese scale, while agreeing that the makers clearly cared about pitch.

The Jiahu flutes are not the world’s oldest instruments. Flutes from caves in Swabia, in southern Germany, made of bird bone and mammoth ivory, are around 40,000 years old. But Jiahu’s flutes are the earliest known from China, and some are complete enough to be played today, which makes them unusually valuable for studying ancient music.

Signs on tortoise shells

Jiahu has also yielded a small number of signs carved onto tortoise shells, bone and stone. A study published in 2003 by Li Xueqin, Garman Harbottle, Zhang Juzhong and Wang Changsui identified about sixteen such signs. A few resemble later Chinese characters; one, for example, has been compared with the character for eye.

Several of the inscribed tortoise shells were found in graves, along with complete shells that contained small pebbles. These may have been rattles used in ritual or, as some suggest, early tools for divination. Thousands of years later, during the Shang dynasty, diviners carved questions to the ancestors on turtle shells and bones in the earliest certain Chinese writing, known from Shang oracle bones of the 13th to 11th centuries BC.

Whether the Jiahu signs are connected to that later script is uncertain. More than 5,000 years separate them, and there is no unbroken chain of evidence. Most scholars therefore see the Jiahu marks as early symbols rather than writing in the sense of a system that records spoken language. They are nonetheless among the earliest known examples of deliberate sign use in China.

The earliest known fermented drink

In 2004 a team led by the American archaeochemist Patrick McGovern, working with Chinese colleagues, analysed residues absorbed into pottery jars from Jiahu’s earliest phase. Using methods such as chromatography and mass spectrometry, they identified chemical markers of rice, honey and fruit, probably hawthorn and/or wild grape.

The results suggested that the jars had held a fermented drink, a mixed beverage somewhere between a rice wine, a mead and a fruit wine. Dated to about 7000–6600 BC, it is the earliest chemically attested alcoholic beverage in the world, earlier than residues of grape wine found in the Near East and the Caucasus.

The discovery attracted wide attention. In 2009 an American brewery worked with McGovern to create a modern drink based on the identified ingredients, marketed as Chateau Jiahu. It is a modern interpretation, not a reconstruction of an exact recipe.

Rice, animals and diet

Rice was found at Jiahu in the form of charred grains and phytoliths, microscopic silica particles from plants. Whether this rice was fully domesticated is debated. It appears to have been at an early stage of cultivation, alongside the collection of wild rice and other plants such as acorns, water chestnuts and lotus roots. Jiahu is therefore important for understanding how rice use spread north from the Yangtze region, where the Shangshan culture had used rice even earlier.

People at Jiahu also hunted deer, fished and caught waterbirds and turtles. Studies of pig bones and teeth suggest that pigs may have been in the early stages of domestication, making Jiahu one of the earliest sites in China with evidence of domestic pigs. Dogs were already domesticated.

Isotope studies of human bones show that diet varied between individuals and changed over time, with plants, fish and land animals all playing a part. This mixed economy, combining cultivation, foraging, fishing and hunting, was typical of early Neolithic China.

Decline and legacy

The settlement was abandoned around 5700 BC. The reasons are unclear. One suggestion is that rising water levels and flooding made the low-lying site difficult to live on, but this has not been proven.

Jiahu’s influence on later cultures is hard to trace in detail. However, its finds show that by the 7th millennium BC, communities in central China had developed musical instruments with careful tuning, ritual practices involving tortoise shells and complex fermented drinks. These features foreshadow aspects of later Chinese civilisation, from ritual music to divination with turtle shells, even if the links are indirect.

The site was listed as a Major Historical and Cultural Site Protected at the National Level in China in 2001. Many of its finds are displayed in the Henan Museum in Zhengzhou.

By the numbers

Timeline

• c. 7000 BC: First phase of settlement at Jiahu; earliest fermented-drink residues.
• c. 6600 BC: Second phase begins; seven-hole flutes become standard.
• c. 6200–5700 BC: Third phase; some flutes with eight holes.
• c. 5700 BC: The settlement is abandoned.
• 1983–1987: Main excavations by the Henan Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology.
• 1999: The flutes are published in Nature as the oldest playable instruments then known.
• 2003: Study of the Jiahu signs published in Antiquity.
• 2004: Analysis of fermented-drink residues published in PNAS.

Why it matters

Jiahu shows that people in central China, more than 8,000 years ago, made finely tuned instruments, used symbols and brewed complex fermented drinks while beginning to cultivate rice and raise pigs. It adds music, ritual and pleasure to the usual picture of early farming as a story of crops and tools alone. For historians of China, it offers one of the earliest glimpses of practices that would later become central to Chinese culture.