Chinese Have Been Radically Changing Their Environment for at Least 3,000 Years

For thousands of years, Mother Nature has taken the blame for tremendous human suffering caused by massive flooding along the Yellow River, long known in China as the "River of Sorrow" and "Scourge of the Sons of Han."

Now, new research from Washington University in St. Louis links the river's increasingly deadly floods to a widespread pattern of human-caused environmental degradation and related flood-mitigation efforts that began changing the river's natural flow nearly 3,000 years ago.

"Human intervention in the Chinese environment is relatively massive, remarkably early and nowhere more keenly witnessed than in attempts to harness the Yellow River," said T.R. Kidder, PhD, lead author of the study and an archaeologist at Washington University.

"In some ways, these findings offer a new benchmark for the beginning of the Anthropocene, the epoch in which humans became the most dominant global force in nature."

Forthcoming in the Journal of Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, the study offers the earliest known archaeological evidence for human construction of large-scale levees and other flood-control systems in China.

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