Historical narratives hold that sericulture originated in China and spread along the Silk Road roughly two millennia ago. In questioning this assumption, we conducted micromorphological and proteomics analyses on three cocoons recovered from the Sapalli Tepe (approximately 2000 to 1500 BCE) site in Uzbekistan. We identified them as Bombyx mori, directly dated to 1940 to 1765 cal. BCE, representing the earliest remains of Bombyx cocoons. We further report the earliest mulberry (Morus sp.) charcoal fragments from Central Asia, attesting to mulberry-Bombyx sericulture in the Oxus nearly 2000 years earlier than previously documented. We highlight that early silkworms and mulberry trees may have been introduced to Central Asia along the southern slope of the Himalayas, although other routes could also plausibly explain the observed pattern. This multidisciplinary research rewrites the enigmatic history of early sericulture and its globalization.

The Central Asian (CA) steppe ecosystem and its fauna experienced a marked transition during the Miocene Climatic Optimum (MCO), though the specific process and dynamics remain elusive. We selected the Duolebulejin (DLB) section within the Junggar Basin to reconstruct vegetation and climate changes, using proxies such as particle size, mammalian fossils, and previously reported data including pollen, delta 13CTOC, and magnetic susceptibility. The results reveal three distinct phases of transformation in regional vegetation and fauna from 18.8 to 13.2 Ma. During the pre-MCO (18.8-17.0 Ma), the landscape was dominated by desert scrubland, primarily inhabited by rodents. The MCO (17.0-14.5 Ma) witnessed a shift towards steppe vegetation, initially with herbaceous taxa followed by the establishment of C4 plants, alongside a diversity of large mammals adapted to open habitats. This suggests the emergence of savanna-like woodland steppes. In the post-MCO (14.5-13.2 Ma), the region transitioned to a dry steppe, accompanied by a decline in animal populations, although a significant proportion of species remained adapted to steppe environments. These findings underscore a co-evolutionary relationship between the development of steppe ecosystems and mammalian adaptations, driven by global MCO warming and subsequent cooling, with regional hydroclimatic changes acting as a modulating factor. The steppe-fauna biome emerged in the Junggar Basin during the MCO warming, with mechanisms resembling those of tropical savannas in the late Miocene. These insights enhance our understanding of early steppe ecosystem evolution through past warming periods, shedding light on the pathways to modern steppe formation.

Our understanding of adaptation by hunter-gatherers in Southern China and Southeast Asia to one of the richest habitats known, has for long been dominated by the investigation of cave sites. These have provided a seriously biased interpretation that stressed transient occupation by small, mobile groups. We here provide the first Bayesian-modelled radiocarbon chronologies for three key sites in Guangxi Province, southern China. Yahuai was occupied thrice between ca. 44 ka and 16.2 ka. Jiangxi'an is an extensive settlement located on the bank of the Zuo River with two occupation phases dated between 9500 and 8300 BP. Ganzao, a second open site, lies nearby on the same river bank and extensive excavations have revealed nearly 100 burials, together with a rich assemblage of material and biological remains dated between 10,300-9500 BP. These river-bank settlements and contemporary coastal sites evidence a radically different adaptation to that derived from rock shelters alone, that coincided with the Holocene thermal optimum and provide a compelling image of the affluent, sedentary hunter-gatherer communities that encountered and were assimilated by the farmers who penetrated the region from their homeland in the Yangtze River region during the third millennium BCEE.

To further explore the economy models and dietary composition of early humans in Guangxi, this study conducted a systematic investigation of the microplant remains and carbonized Fagaceae fruits from the Fulan site in Tiandong County, Guangxi Province through chronology, phytolith analysis and charred Fagaceae seed morphology. The results indicate that the AMS 14C dating result of the Fulan site ranges from 5904 to 5732 cal BP. No obvious cereal agriculture activities were identified from the phytolith assemblages obtained from the pottery, stone tools, and cultural layer in this site. However, a large number of charred acorns were discovered in the cultural layer, which is the first time in this region. Morphology analysis showed the charred acorns found at the site are most similar to the Fagaceae flora, specifically Castanopsis sclerophylla, which is one of the dominant species in this region. Micro CT results also indicate the acorns were roasted by humans for consumption. Combining the analysis results of macrobotanical remains and phytoliths in the site, the acorns represented by Castanopsis sclerophylla were one of the most important food sources for local people at that time, which provides new insights for the plant utilization methods in the early community in Guangxi region.

The co-evolution of climate-environment and ancient vertebrates fossil human are core topics in the theory of biological evolution. At the micro level, we hope to understand the feeding habits of some important groups of organisms in ancient ecosystems, such as dinosaurs, birds, and mammals, as well as their related feeding behaviors, migration patterns, and ecological niches. This requires a comprehensive analysis of key global climate processes during critical periods, the evolution of terrestrial ecosystems, and their relationship with the origin, evolution, and extinction of ancient fossil fauna. Similarly, changes in global climate and ancient monsoon systems have played important roles in the origin, migration, diffusion and behavioral patterns of ancient human being. The domestication of animals and plants and the origin of agriculture are the most representative examples of the co-evolution of human and ecosystem. The early agricultural society not only adapted to most of the area of the terrestrial ecosystem, but also transformed it into the human ecosystem to a large extent.

The seaweed cottage is a traditional residence in the Jiaodong (胶东) region that has existed for hundreds of years. During its development, its architectural form was evidently reconstructed and redeveloped. Based on historical documents, interviews, field investigations, and mapping, the author summarizes the village environment, overall layout, and architectural attributes of Dongchu Island Village (东褚岛村, DIV) to address the common needs of historical heritage protection. In order to examine in depth, the spatial evolution of the five stages in the past one hundred years, the Wangs' grocery seaweed courtyard located on the southwest corner of Middle Street was selected as a typical research object. Analyzed as two clues, the village and dwelling, three key factors are identified as influencing spatial change: Characteristics of the time, economic industry, and personnel structure.

鱼山遗址是宁绍平原河姆渡文化时期以来的重要遗存,其考古发现为探讨东部沿海地带长时间尺度的水稻驯化进程和人地关系提供了良好素材.高精度的植硅体分析表明,河姆渡时期以来水稻扇型个体呈现了变小稳定的趋势,并逐渐向中间型和长柄型演化,暗示先民是以种植粳型化的水稻为主;水稻扇型植硅体鱼鳞状纹饰的变化揭示了在河姆渡文化晚期,水稻的驯化基本完成.受海平面变化的频繁影响,该地的水稻驯化具有一定的滞后性,驯化的周期也有所延长.结合植硅体分析和多种研究成果,推断在河姆渡文化时期,鱼山遗址的稻作生产获得了较大发展;在河姆渡文化晚期,水稻逐渐成为先民植食性资源的主体;在滨海多变的环境背景下,鱼山遗址形成了以水稻种植为主,采集和渔猎并行的多元化生业模式.良渚晚期,伴随着水稻驯化的完成和生产工具的进步,推测出现了系统的水田耕作系统.商周时期,依托暖干的环境,稻作生产向集约化发展,为古越国的兴起奠定了基础.

Angiosperms became the dominant plant group in early to middle Cretaceous terrestrial ecosystems, coincident with the timing of the earliest pulse of bird diversification. While living birds and angiosperms exhibit strong interactions across pollination/nectivory, seed dispersal/frugivory, and folivory, documentation of the evolutionary origins and construction of that ecological complexity remains scarce in the Mesozoic. Through the first study of preserved in situ dietary derived phytoliths in a nearly complete skeleton of the early diverging avialan clade Jeholornithidae, we provide direct dietary evidence that Jeholornis consumed leaves likely from the magnoliid angiosperm clade, and these results lend further support for early ecological connections among the earliest birds and angiosperms. The broad diet of the early diverging avialan Jeholornis including at least fruits and leaves marks a clear transition in the early evolution of birds in the establishment of an arboreal (angiosperm) herbivore niche in the Early Cretaceous occupied largely by birds today. Morphometric reanalysis of the lower jaw of Jeholornis further supports a generalized morphology shared with other herbivorous birds, including an extant avian folivore, the hoatzin.

The water vapor source in Central Asia (CA) during the middle Miocene Climatic Optimum (MMCO) is debated. We investigated the Duolebulejin (DLB) section in the Junggar Basin, dated to 18.8-13.2 million years ago (Ma), to reconstruct the history of the vegetation using analyses of multiple indices including pollen, soil organic matter carbon isotopes (delta 13CSOM) and magnetic susceptibility (MS). Results reveal a significant regional C4 vegetation expansion during 15.5-14.0 Ma, which was linked to a shift in the configuration of precipitation, manifested by higher seasonality and more summer precipitation under a climatic context conducive to the growth of C4 plants. The water vapor trajectory revealed by paleobotanical data from Eurasia, together with other paleoclimate records, suggests that the synchronous intensification of the Indian summer monsoon (ISM) may have been responsible for this shift. Combining with climate simulations and other evidence, we argue that the summer precipitation pattern in CA during the warming middle Miocene was modulated by the ISM via the monsoon-westerly interactions at high and low latitudes.

Reconstructing diet can offer an improved understanding toward the origin and evolution of modern humans. However, the diet of early modern humans in East Asia is poorly understood. Starch analysis of dental calculus is harmless to precious fossil hominins and provides the most direct evidence of plant food sources in early modern human dietary records. In this paper, we examined the starch grains in dental calculus from Fuyan Cave hominins in Daoxian (South China), which were the earliest modern humans in East Asia. Our results reveal the earliest direct evidence of a hominin diet made of acorns, roots, tubers, grass seeds, and other yet-unidentified plants in marine isotope stage 5 between 120 and 80 ka. Our study also provides the earliest evidence that acorns may have played an important role in subsistence strategies. There may have been a long-lasting tradition of using these plants during the Late Pleistocene in China. Plant foods would have been a plentiful source of carbohydrates that greatly increased energy availability to human tissues with high glucose demands. Our study provides the earliest direct consumption of carbohydrates-rich plant resources from modern humans in China for the first time. In addition, it also helps elucidate the evolutionary advantages of early modern humans in the late Middle and early Upper Pleistocene.

Understanding the role of agriculture in the development of human societies around the world is an important field of study with many unanswered questions. As a step toward that greater understanding, we have studied the archeobotanical remains at the Jingshuidun site in the mountainous areas of the lower reaches of the Yangtze River in southern Anhui Province which are part of the core area of rice cultivation today. Our analyses of macrobotanical remains and phytoliths formed the basis for the reconstruction of the subsistence economy of ancient humans at the Jingshuidun site from the late Neolithic to early historical times. When our data are combined with that of previous archeobotanical work, we obtain a clearer picture of the development of rice and millet agriculture in the southern Anhui Province region, as well as the spread of millet cultivation. Macrobotanical remains and phytoliths of domesticated rice are present in layers at the Jingshuidun site dated to 4874–4820 cal. yr B.P. (middle-late Liangzhu Period) and 2667–2568 cal. yr B.P. (late Western Zhou Dynasty to the early Spring and Autumn Period). Moreover, macrobotanical remains and phytoliths from the site document the earliest remains of foxtail millet (Setaria italica) in southern Anhui Province, from a layer dating to the late Western Zhou Dynasty and the early Spring and Autumn Period (2667-2568 cal. yr B.P.). These results suggest that the people occupying the Jingshuidun site used single rice farming as far back as 4874–4820 cal. yr B.P., and they began to plant millet by at least 2667–2568 cal. yr B.P., documenting the spread of millet agriculture to the southern area by that time.

南阳盆地,作为地理过渡地带和文化交汇区,其考古学文化面貌呈现出南北交融的典型特征.文坎沟东地点是南阳盆地淅川县龙山时代晚期和西周时期的重要遗存,本文综合运用大植物和植硅体分析的方法,结合已有的植物考古证据和最新的测年结果,全面探讨了文坎先民先秦时期的种植模式和特点.研究结果显示,龙山时代晚期,文坎先民是以粟、黍为主的旱作农业为生,兼种少量水稻和小麦,小麦和水稻在先民生活中的作用比较微弱;西周时期,延续了旱作农业为主的生产模式,种植规模略有扩大,未见炭化水稻的踪迹,但植硅体分析显示仍有水稻种植的现象;受中原宗周势力的影响和版图扩张的需求,小麦逐渐开始在先民生活中占据一席之地.文坎沟东地点植物遗存的发现与研究,为揭示豫西南先秦时期的文化面貌和与中原地区的文化交流提供了新的材料.

Wang et al. (Research Articles, 3 June 2022, eabl8316) reported an early Miocene giraffoid that exhibited fierce head-butting behavior and concluded that sexual selection promoted head-neck evolution in giraffoids. However, we argue that this ruminant is not a giraffoid and thus that the hypothesis that sexual selection promoted giraffoid head-neck evolution is not sufficiently supported.

Late Paleolithic sites are widely distributed in southern China (the Lingnan region), which mainly includes Guangxi, Guangdong and Hainan Provinces. Although the pebble-tool industry continued to exist in this region during the late Pleistocene and Holocene, small flake-tool assemblages also occurred and coexisted with the pebble-tool industry. The pebble-tool industries are characterized by unifacially flaked cobble tools, dominated by choppers, with a lack of handaxes. The small flake-tool industries have the characteristics of retouched tools made on small fakes, a striking platform of cores without preparation, and scrapers dominating the assemblage. Technologically and typologically, pebble tools of the Late Palaeolithic are similar to those of the Early Palaeolithic in this region and belong to the same cultural tradition. The small flake tools, however, are very different from the cobble tools. They belong to a new technology which originated from northern China during the period of the Last Glacial Maximum. The Late Palaeolithic industries in Southern China are similar to those in mainland Southeast Asia.

Phytolith analysis was conducted on soil samples from an archeological profile at the Hehuashan site, located in the upper Qiantang River region, China. This paper focuses on: (1) changes on the morphometric features of Oryza -type bulliform phytoliths from the rice leaves of the Early Neolithic Hehuashan site, (2) human adaptations during the Early Holocene, and (3) the cultivation of rice by Early Neolithic occupants in the upper Qiantang River region. The phytolith assemblage before and during the Early Neolithic Shangshan Culture occupation of the Hehuashan site indicates a landscape composed of reeds ( Phragmites australis ), rice ( Oryza sp.), Bambusoideae, and some woody plants. The amount of Oryza -type bulliform phytoliths and the number of scale-like decorations present along their margins increased from the lowest to the uppermost deposits at the site. The change in the amount and morphology of bulliform phytoliths indicates the presence of wild rice around the site at the time of human occupation, which provides evidence of a shift from the collection and possible manipulation of wild rice to cultivation during the Shangshan Culture period (11400–8600 BP).

Reconstructing the diet of extinct species is a fundamental goal in vertebrate paleobiology. Dental calculus is the calcium phosphate deposits on teeth, which captures a large number of food particles and contains the food information of ancient animal. It is possible to explore ancient animal dietary and investigate the environmental information from dental calculus. A large number of starch granules were found in dental calculus of Dicros gansuensis excavated from the earliest Late Miocene Guonigou fauna of the Linxia Basin, Gansu Province. It is the first time that starch granules from Late Miocene were found. We classified the ancient starch granules by its morphological characteristics and also analyzed the starch granules of leaves of modern plants around the living environment of D. gansuensis to find modern starch granules and compare them with ancient ones. The results indicate that D. gansuensis may eat not only shrubs leaves, such as the plant from Caprifoliaceae, but also some tree leaves from Juglandaceae (walnut), and maybe some herbs from Ranunculaceae and Polygonaceae. It is consistent with the results of previous morphological studies, and it also provides more information. Our study extends the range of time and object for dental calculus research, and offers more possibilities for research on feeding habits of ancient mammals.

Feeding preference of fossil herbivorous mammals, concerning the coevolution of mammalian and floral ecosystems, has become of key research interest. In this paper, phytoliths in dental calculus from two gomphotheriid proboscideans of the middle Miocene Junggar Basin, Central Asia, have been identified, suggesting that Gomphotherium connexum was a mixed feeder, while the phytoliths from G. steinheimense indicates grazing preference. This is the earliest-known proboscidean with a predominantly grazing habit. These results are further confirmed by microwear and isotope analyses. Pollen record reveals an open steppic environment with few trees, indicating an early aridity phase in the Asian interior during the Mid-Miocene Climate Optimum, which might urge a diet remodeling of G. steinheimense. Morphological and cladistic analyses show that G. steinheimense comprises the sister taxon of tetralophodont gomphotheres, which were believed to be the general ancestral stock of derived "true elephantids"; whereas G. connexum represents a more conservative lineage in both feeding behavior and tooth morphology, which subsequently became completely extinct. Therefore, grazing by G. steinheimense may have acted as a behavior preadaptive for aridity, and allowing its lineage evolving new morphological features for surviving later in time. This study displays an interesting example of behavioral adaptation prior to morphological modification.

Grasses (Poaceae) are humans most important crop plants and among the most important extant clades of vascular plants. However, the origin and early evolution of grasses are controversial, with estimated ages from molecular dating ranging between 59 and 129 Ma (million years ago). Here we report the discovery of basalmost grasses from the late Early Cretaceous (Albian, 113-101 Ma) of China based on microfossils (silicified epidermal pieces and phytoliths) extracted from a special structure along the dentition of a basal hadrosauroid (duck-billed dinosaur). Thus, this discovery represents the earliest known grass fossils, and is congruent with previous estimations on grass origin and early evolution calibrated by oldest known fossil grasses, highlighting the role of fossils in molecular dating. This discovery also indicates deep-diverging grasses probably gained broad distribution across both Laurasian and Gondwanan continents during the Barremian (129-125 Ma).