her separate culture. They were
shepherds, generally wandering with their flocks of sheep and goats on
the mountain heights.

(e) In the _south_ we meet with four further cultures. One is very
primitive, the Liao culture, the peoples of which are the Austroasiatics
already mentioned. These are peoples who never developed beyond the
stage of primitive hunters, some of whom were not even acquainted with
the bow and arrow. Farther east is the Yao culture, an early
Austronesian culture, the people of which also lived in the mountains,
some as collectors and hunters, some going over to a simple type of
agriculture (denshiring). They mingled later with the last great culture
of the south, the Tai culture, distinguished by agriculture. The people
lived in the valleys and mainly cultivated rice.

The origin of rice is not yet known; according to some scholars, rice
was first cultivated in the area of present Burma and was perhaps at
first a perennial plant. Apart from the typical rice which needs much
water, there were also some strains of dry rice which, however, did not
gain much importance. The centre of this Tai culture may have been in
the present provinces of Kuangtung and Kuanghsi. Today, their
descendants form the principal components of the Tai in Thailand, the
Shan in Burma and the Lao in Laos. Their immigration into the areas of
the Shan States of Burma and into Thailand took place only in quite
recent historical periods, probably not much earlier than A.D. 1000.

Finally there arose from the mixture of the Yao with the Tai culture, at
a rather later time, the Yueeh culture, another early Austronesian
culture, which then spread over wide regions of Indonesia, and of which
the axe of rectangular section, mentioned above, became typical.

Thus, to sum up, we may say that, quite roughly, in the middle of the
third millennium we meet in the _north_ and west of present-day China
with a number of herdsmen cultures. In the _south_ there were a number
of agrarian cultures, of which the Tai was the most powerful, becoming
of most importance to the later China. We must assume that these
cultures were as yet undifferentiated in their social composition, that
is to say that as yet there was no distinct social stratification, but
at most beginnings of class-formation, especially among the nomad
herdsmen.

[Illustration: Map 1. Regions of the principal local cultures in
prehistoric times. _Local cultures of minor importance h