Modern research has not only demonstrated that all these accounts are
inventions of a much later period, but has also shown _why_ such
narratives were composed. The older historical sources make no mention
of any rulers before 2200 B.C., no mention even of their names. The
names of earlier rulers first appear in documents of about 400 B.C.; the
deeds attributed to them and the dates assigned to them often do not
appear until much later. Secondly, it was shown that the traditional
chronology is wrong and another must be adopted, reducing all the dates
for the more ancient history, before 900 B.C. Finally, all narratives
and reports from China's earliest period have been dealt a mortal blow
by modern archaeology, with the excavations of recent years. There was
no trace of any high civilization in the third millennium B.C., and,
indeed, we can only speak of a real "Chinese civilization" from 1300
B.C. onward. The peoples of the China of that time had come from the
most varied sources; from 1300 B.C. they underwent a common process of
development that welded them into a new unity. In this sense and
emphasizing the cultural aspects, we are justified in using from then on
a new name, "Chinese", for the peoples of China. Those sections,
however, of their ancestral populations who played no part in the
subsequent cultural and racial fusion, we may fairly call "non-Chinese".
This distinction answers the question that continually crops up, whether
the Chinese are "autochthonons". They are autochthonons in the sense
that they formed a unit in the Far East, in the geographical region of
the present China, and were not immigrants from the Middle East.


2 _The Peking Man_

Man makes his appearance in the Far East at a time when remains in other