In Search Of The Origins Of Domestic Water Buffalo In China

The Center for Chinese Studies at UC Berkeley presents a discussion with Li Liu from Stanford University.

Featured Speaker: Li Liu, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Stanford University

Recent studies on water buffalo (Bubalus) remains from Asia have challenged a traditional belief that water buffalo were first domesticated over 7000 years ago in China and related to rice cultivation. We integrate zooarchaeological and ancient DNA approaches to analyzing water buffalo remains from Neolithic and Bronze Age sites in China, in order to determine their species status and to shed light on the origin of modern domestic water buffalo. The preliminary results of our research indicate that the Chinese indigenous buffalo (B. mephistopheles) existing during the Holocene were neither domestic nor closely-related to the ancestral population of modern domestic water buffalo in Asia. Several lines of evidence from archaeology and ethnography suggest that the domesticated swamp water buffalo is likely to have been introduced to China through the so-called Southwest Silk Road, which connected Southwest China with SE Asia, around the Han dynasty (206 BC – AD 220) when cultural interaction between China and its surrounding regions intensified.