Rising seas made China's ancient mariners

Science News -

A rising tide lifts all boats, but in a surprising twist, ascending sea levels launched a flotilla of rafts or canoes on voyages from China to Taiwan around 5,000 years ago, a new study suggests.

At a time when rice farming dominated in other regions, the inundation of the Fuzhou Basin in southeastern China starting about 9,000 years ago led to the creation of a maritime culture that eventually took to the seas, says a team led by archaeologist Barry Rolett of the University of Hawaii in Honolulu.

Analyses of sediment cores extracted from the Fuzhou Basin indicate that, at that time, the kind of marshy areas that are needed for rice paddies disappeared under rising waters. What are hilltops in the region today shrank to islands no more than one mile across.

Locals built outposts on newly minted islands starting around 5,500 years ago and honed their nautical skills, probably using wooden canoes or bamboo rafts to obtain fish and other aquatic food in a vast estuary, Rolett and his colleagues report in the April Quaternary Science Reviews. A largely rice-free, maritime lifestyle eventually enabled sea voyages of 130 kilometers to Taiwan, Rolett proposes. Farming villages first appeared on Taiwan 5,000 years ago.

Rolett’s findings challenge a popular scientific view that a transition to village life in northern China around 8,000 years ago triggered rice-fueled population growth that spread southward. In that scenario, shortages of marshy land suitable for rice paddies motivated sea crossings to Taiwan, possibly originating in the Yangtze Delta just north of the Fuzhou Basin, where researchers have found a 7,700-year-old canoe and three wooden paddles.

“People of the Fuzhou Basin lived on little islands in an estuary that favored maritime activities and seafaring,” Rolett says. “Rice farming was not part of the equation.” Small amounts of rice could have been tended on patches of dry land watered by rain, he holds.

Rolett’s evidence that fishing and seafaring dwarfed rice growing in a submerged section of southeastern China, possibly prompting Taiwan’s colonization, “is quite plausible,” comments archaeologist Robert Bettinger of the University of California, Davis.

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