Archaeologists in central China announced last week the discovery of a 5,500-year-old structure that they believe was used by a neolithic culture at the forefront of ancient Chinese pottery. The structure, which lies in Taiyuan in Shanxi province, was shaped like a pentagon and was excavated between May and June 2021. It was discovered during the construction process of a school in the city. Pei Jingrong, who led the excavation, told mainland media that the building is about 32 sq m and was found alongside evidence of columns, extensive pottery and an old stove pit and flue. The site also contained six tombs from the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1912) dynasties. While the use of the structure is still unknown, Pei said the discovery would create “strong academic value to the research of Neolithic and prehistoric cultures in the Taiyuan basin”. The site is believed to have belonged to the Yangshao culture, a Neolithic society that lived along the middle sections of the Yellow River from around 5,000 to 3,000BC. The Yangshao people lived in settled villages and are sometimes called the “Painted-pottery Culture” because of their beautiful pottery and ceramics-making skills. Exquisite examples of skilful pottery adorned with elegant decorations can be found in museums across China. The Yangshao culture did not use pottery wheels to make their pieces and scientists hypothesised that the decorative ceramics might have been created solely for funerary practices. Excavations pointed to a theory that children who had died were buried in painted jars as part of an “urn burial funerary tradition”. They were not cremated like modern rituals. Because there is no evidence of writing, thousands of years of history have been condensed into a relatively simplified version of a culture that stretched across thousands of years. Even the term “Yangshao culture” is a broad catch-all phrase used to describe various Neolithic communities that may not have had much, if any, contact with one another. One possible insight the discovery could elicit is further understanding of communication and information sharing between Taiyuan and the surrounding areas. The communities likely farmed for food and kept domesticated animals like chickens, dogs, goats and possibly cattle, according to the New World Encyclopedia . The 2016 discovery of the possibility that they brewed beer 5,000 years ago indicated that the alcohol may have led to the transport of barley from Eurasia to China thousands of years before it became a subsistence crop. Scientists debate if the people followed slash-and-burn style agriculture or had built sophisticated long-term farms. Another point of debate is whether Yangshao culture was a matriarchal society, evidenced by the discovery of graves in which women could be buried with their children but men could not. Recently, scientists have pushed back against the theory, pointing out that the number of graves skewed heavily towards females, according to an examination of Neolithic cultures published by Shu Xin Chen at McGill University. The Yangshao people were discovered in 1921 by a Swedish archaeologist named Johan Gunnar Andersson after finding fossils near the central Chinese town of Yangshao in Henan, hence the namesake. Andersson’s discovery was considered the beginning of modern archaeology in China, and the site was included in China’s announcement of its “Top 100 discoveries” to celebrate the centennial of the practice in the country. The site was protected by the State Council, the top administrative body in China, in 1961.