© Science China Press and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010 csb.scichina.com www.springerlink.com *Corresponding authors (fhchen@lzu.edu.cn; rlbettinger@ucdavis.edu) Articles SPECIAL TOPICS: Geology June 2010 Vol.55 No.16: 1636−1642 doi: 10.1007/s11434-010-3097-4 Archaeological records of Dadiwan in the past 60 ka and the origin of millet agriculture ZHANG DongJu 1 , CHEN FaHu 1* , BETTINGER R L 2* , BARTON L 2 , JI DuXue 1 , MORGAN C 3 , WANG Hui 4 , CHENG XiaoZhong 5 , DONG GuangHui 1 , GUILDERSON T P 6 & ZHAO Hui 7 1 Key Laboratory of West China’s Environmental System (MOE), Lanzhou University, Lanzhou 730000, China; 2 Department of Anthropology, University of California, Davis, CA 95616, USA; 3 Department of Sociology, Social Work, and Anthropology, Utah State University, Logan, UT 84322, USA; 4 Gansu Province Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, Lanzhou 730000, China; 5 Preservation Institute of Dadiwan, Qin’an 741600, China; 6 Center for Accelerator Mass Spectrometry, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, CA 94550, USA; 7 Key Laboratory of Desert and Desertification, Cold and Arid Regions Environmental and Engineering Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Lanzhou 730000, China Received June 22, 2009; accepted November 2, 2009 This paper reports the recent excavation of Unit Dadiwan06 at the Dadiwan site in Qin’an County, Gansu. A 65 ka chronological framework is established for Dadiwan06 on the basis of absolute dating (AMS 14 C and OSL), stratigraphy, climate change events and archaeology. Artifact distributions reveal patterns of human behavioral variation and adaptation over the past 60 ka, from primitive hunting and gathering to advanced hunting and gathering, to primitive Neolithic agriculture, and finally to advanced Neolithic agriculture. Dadiwan site, Loess-Paleosol stratigraphy, hunting and gathering, millet agriculture origin, stone tool technology Citation: Zhang D J, Chen F H, Bettinger R L, et al. Archaeological records of Dadiwan in the past 60 ka and the origin of millet agriculture. Chinese Sci Bull, 2010, 55: 1636−1642, doi: 10.1007/s11434-010-3097-4 North China is one of a dozen or more places around the world where hunter-gatherers invented agriculture without the help of pre-existing farmers. About 8000 a BP, agricul- ture based on foxtail millet (Setaria italica) and broomcorn millet (Panicum miliaceum) began to appear across North China [1−4]. New studies from the Cishan site in Hebei show that broomcorn millet was an important resource as early as 10 ka BP, but that foxtail millet was not important until sometime after 8700 a BP [5]. The timing of early plant domestication in China is a topic of considerable popularity, but with few exceptions [6,7], explanations for the origin and development of agriculture receive much less attention. It is widely believed that millet farming in China evolved from the advanced hunter-gatherer adaptation rep- resented by North China Microliths [8−10], as both of them indicate patterns of intensive resource procurement. There- fore, the study of the people who made the microblades should provide information about the evolution of millet farming. Although some sites containing both Paleolithic and Neolithic records have been found in China [11,12], no specific study of the development of millet farming from hunting and gathering has been done [13,14]. Consequently, the transition to agriculture in China is not as well under- stood as similar transitions in other parts of the world [15]. Enhanced study of Chinese Microlithic and Early Neo- lithic remains may help to solve these problems. But there is still a problem that the archaeological assemblages of early millet farming and the archaeological assemblages of the North China Microliths are very different. Microblades and