Based on the major research results of the "Chinese Civilization Exploration Project" and "Archaeological China", under the guidance of the State Administration of Cultural Heritage and the Propaganda Department of the Shanghai Municipal Party Committee, supported by the Shanghai Municipal Administration of Cultural Heritage, and created by Shanghai Radio and Television, the second episode of the 8-episode large-scale documentary "Why China" "The Cradle" was broadcast on Dragon TV and Blockbuster TV at 21:10 on the evening of December 15, and simultaneously broadcast on Internet platforms such as iQiyi, Tencent Video, Youku, and Station B.
Over the past 100 years, relying on the efforts of generations of archaeologists, China's 10,000-year-old cultural history has been verified. 10,000 years ago, our ancestors struggled to survive between heaven and earth. They made stone tools, passed on fire, developed agriculture, made pottery, built houses, and created the crystallization of wisdom adapted to the natural environment. They have gone farther and farther again and again, creating the deep-rooted roots of Chinese civilization. If the first episode of the documentary "Qin and Han Dynasties" is a "prologue", the second episode "Cradle" takes the audience back to the era in which the ancestors lived thousands of years or even 10,000 years ago, starting from the context of the origin of settlement and agricultural civilization, showing the "cradle" of the birth of civilization.
65 million years ago, the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau was uplifted, and the Loess Plateau, Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau, and Inner Mongolia Plateau were uplifted, forming a three-level basic geographical pattern in China. About two to three million years ago, Homo erectus appeared on the East Asian continent, and the story of the multiplication and continuous evolution of ancient humans in the East began. Yuanmou people in Yunnan, Lantian people in Shaanxi, people in Beijing, people from Maba in Guangdong, people from Liujiang in Guangxi, people from Cave in the top of the mountain...... These fossilized remains of ancient ancestors retain the distinctive features of ancient Chinese humans: the sagittal ridge in the middle of the skull, the prominent face, the high and protruding cheekbones, the broad nose, the spade-shaped incisors, and the round pillow of the lower jaw.
The opening episode of "The Cradle" showcases the latest archaeological findings and the latest technological applications. The film crew entered the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences to film the sampling process of ancient DNA in the ultra-clean room. Paleogeneticists have obtained the first paleogenome of an ancient human in China from the leg bone of a man in Tianyuandong, about 40,000 years ago, and the oldest human genome in East Asia so far.
Between the stars and the stars, the immortal cave people about 20,000 years ago found a suitable cave to live in. The documentary uses film and television to show human life at the height of the last ice age: old people knock flints to smash stone chips, women sew animal skins with bone needles, tribesmen harvest wild grasses, fish with bone fish branches, and also catch mussels and snails, and children practice hunting skills in the fields and forests. The world's earliest known pottery vessels have been unearthed at the Xianren Cave site in Jiangxi, and there are still traces of soot and fire on the outer surface, which archaeologists speculate were used as cooking utensils.
From cave dwelling to settlement, from gathering, fishing and hunting to farming, the episode "Cradle" follows the footprints of the early ancestors, visiting the Neolithic sites such as the Xinglongwa site of Aohan Banner in Inner Mongolia, the Hemudu site in Yuyao, Zhejiang, and the Gaomiao site in Hongjiang in Hunan.
The development of agriculture and the diversification of access to food represented a major advance in early material civilization. The history of rice cultivation in southern China can be traced back to the Shangshan culture about 10,000 years ago. In the ash pit No. 461 of the Shangshan site of Pujiang, Zhejiang, the earliest known carbonized rice seed in the world was found. The diet of the ancestors in the north was mainly millet and millet, which are among the traditional Chinese "five grains". In the Donghulin site of Mentougou in Beijing, the earliest carbonized millet grains have been found so far. When the ancestors of the south built dry stilt houses in the settlement area, the ancestors of the north also appeared in the early settlement settlement - the site of Shangyi Sitai in Hebei Province found rows and a half of crypt houses, about 10,000 years ago. The emergence of sedentary lifestyles became an important condition for the origin and development of dryland agriculture in the northern region.
If the carbonized grain is a symbol of the material life of the ancestors, those pottery, bone ware, jade, etc., which are full of primitive art, or special funeral rites, are the portrayal of the spiritual life of the ancestors. The documentary presents a wonderful presentation of little-known archaeological discoveries, such as the white pottery of the Gaomiao culture unearthed in Hongjiang, Hunan, on which the images of phoenixes, animal faces, and ladders often appear, reflecting the early ancestors' respect for nature and life.
Another example is the Xinglongwa site of Ao Han Banner in Inner Mongolia, which is one of the representative cultures of the Neolithic Age in the north. When the film and television reappeared, the guests of Xinglongwa wore mussel ornaments on their upper arms, which were restored with reference to the cultural relics unearthed at the Baiyin Changhan site. The leader of Xinglongwa in the film is the prototype of the owner of Tomb No. 118 of the Xinglongwa site, and there are mussel shell ornaments on his wrists.
The episode "Cradle" ends with a film and television restoration of Banpo Village. Located on the east bank of the Chan River in Xi'an City, Shaanxi Province, the Banpo site belongs to the Banpo type of Yangshao culture. In this restored Banpo village, the film crew built houses in the northern semi-crypt, large and small, square and round, with different styles. The pottery that appears in the picture is all restored according to the Banpo type of pottery, including the most famous human-faced fish-patterned pot. In terms of diet, millet porridge was the staple food of people at that time, and at the same time, according to archaeological discoveries, there are traces of domesticated pig bones, so in the Banpo village on the picture, the people are eating a whole pig that has been roasted. Interestingly, the film crew also deliberately added a dog to the frame, because humans had already completed the domestication of dogs at this time.
The Chinese civilization has continued to develop, and the pluralistic characteristics of various places since the cradle of civilization have gradually moved towards integration in the evolution of civilization, but in the pattern of integration, they have always maintained their pluralistic activity.
Since the beginning of the project, the State Administration of Cultural Heritage has taken the lead in organizing multiple rounds of topic selection and academic seminars, giving strong policy support and resource guarantee throughout the filming process, and carefully guiding the team to focus on the theme and grasp the details during the finalization and completion stage of the documentary. Jin Ruiguo, director of the Department of Policies and Regulations of the State Administration of Cultural Heritage and director of the Information Center, once planned the "Why China" exhibition held in the Forbidden City with excellent reputation and traffic, and then became associated with the documentary "Why China" as the director of the film. In his view, "Why China" is like a super IP, about how Chinese civilization flows from a trickle to a confluence of rivers, "What we want to explore is the characteristics of Chinese civilization and the spirit of the Chinese nation that are immersed in the blood and have not changed, and find the cultural genes why we are 'Chinese', which is the origin of Chinese civilization and the source of cultural self-confidence." ”