TechnologyEast Asia
Millet on the Yellow River
North China's own farming — dry where the south was wet
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The loess soil of the north China plains is fine, deep and easy to work with simple tools — one of the most fertile soils on Earth, laid down as dust from ice-age deserts. The Yangshao culture that grew here left painted pottery and villages of several hundred people, and became the core of what later became China.
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In northern China it was too dry for rice. There people grew millet instead, a hardy grain that copes with little water. Two entirely different farming systems grew up in the same country, and only met thousands of years later.
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Part of Terra Saga — the story of Earth on a timeline. terrasaga.org