South China Line: A Hypothesis about the Cultural Boundaries before the Spread of the Austronesian Population

LI Fa-jun

The "South China Line" hypothesis suggests that the prehistoric human population in South China underwent a significant cultural transformation. In the early and middle stages of the Neolithic Age, the custom of bending limbs for burial was widely prevalent in the entire southern region of China, and no individual was found to have the custom of extracting specific teeth during their lifetime. However, in the late Neolithic Age, in the the Pearl River Delta and its northern and eastern regions, the burial custom of leaning up and straight limbs began to appear, and many individuals found examples of removing specific teeth during their lifetime. At least around 5000 years ago, prehistoric sites in Guangxi still maintained the burial custom of "bent limbs burial+non extraction of teeth"; The custom of "burying with straight limbs and extracting teeth", which originated from the Dawenkou Culture and gradually spread to southern China, has also spread to Hainan Province, northern Vietnam, and many Southeast Asian islands. The origin of the Austronesian language family should be closely related to the prehistoric populations in southern China, and the development of Vietnamese Bronze Age archaeological culture and the evolution of customs should also be directly related to the migration of populations from the late Neolithic period to the Shang Dynasty in Guangdong. We look forward to further discussions on this topic in the future.