Lying due east, some 1,921 km from the Longyou caves, precisely on the 30 N. parallel, we find the modern city of Sichuan. Like the village of Sheyan Beicun, near the caves, it guarded an ancient, secret treasure buried underground, very nearby, for thousands of years.
Nonetheless, in the spring of 1929, a farmer was digging a well when to his amazement he discovered a large stash of carved jade relics. The find would eventually upset the applecart of ancient China’s early historical timeline. Historians had long assumed that Chinese civilization had emerged near the Yellow River basin.
However, the jade relics the farmer had unearthed were the first clues that eventually would lead to the discovery of a mysterious, lost kingdom. But that would take several generations of Chinese archaeologists combing the area where the farmer’s original cache was located, without success.
But in 1986, workers stumbled upon several pits containing thousands of artifacts that had been broken, burned, and then carefully buried. They would turn out to be the most ancient relics of China. Stunning artifacts that eventually established that the Sanxingdiu was the original culture that preceded all other Chinese civilizations.
Moreover, it turned out to be a very strange culture indeed, when giant bronze masks -- looking half-human/half-alien -- were unearthed unexpectedly. The Saningdiu was a Bronze Age culture that produced incredibly sophisticated, sometimes weird and other times beautiful, artifacts. (See below insert)
📷Bronze bust
The early Bronze Age poses many enigmas, most of which, are never fully addressed by conventional archaeologists and/or historians. We need to pause this narrative here at this early point to examine this mysterious era very carefully. The study will shed necessary light on our earliest civilizations, particularly the enigmatic Sanxingdiu culture in question.
Historians tell us that people emerged from the Stone Age and virtually went right into inventing and fabricating an alloy, an artificial metal just like that, snap! Without much fanfare it seems to have happened but no deep explanations nor any detailed analyses is presented to explain the process.
We are supposed to simply take what is presented by our academics as the matter of fact gospel truth, without question.
But wait just a minute…
Stone Age to Bronze Age in a single bound, a quantum leap?
Before we simply assume that was not only possible, but it actually happened, we need to stop and examine this alloy. Bronze is the product of combining a small amount of tin with copper and then fusing them together in temperatures that reach 1,742 degrees at least; a very high temperature for early human cultures to generate and control.
Problem number one: Tin was not a metal that our Stone Age ancestors could have known anything about let own experiment with and use. Unlike copper which can be found on the surface in placer deposits, tin has be extracted from mining rocks/ores that contain it.
Question: When did the first human geologist knowing about tin appear? Was it during the late Paleolithic or early to mid- Neolithic era?
In fact, Tin is a relatively rare element in the Earth's crust, with approximately 2 ppm (parts per million), compared to copper and iron both with 50,000 ppm. Yet the, Bronze Age appears long before the Iron Age (1500 BC), even though the former had to be created from scratch; and we must assume that process required a long period of experimentation, trial and error.
Problem number two: Exactly how did our ancient ancestors go about determining it even existed in the first place? Moreover we must consider the following quote, “It is still unclear where the earliest tin was mined, as tin deposits are very rare and evidence of early mining is scarce.” (Wikipedia)
The evidence is more than scarce it is slim to none. Tin is found embedded in, and mined from, granitic rock primarily so our ancestors did not stumble over rocks containing it. Therefore, I shall leave it up to the imaginations of our scholars to explain how Neolithic people found it, mined it, and extracted it to begin with.
Moreover, we have to wonder what Tesla-like, ancient genius dreamed up the notion that a new metal could be made by heating up tin and copper and melting them together to obtain a new metal. That seems a very far stretch for Neolithic people just creating civilization out of whole cloth.
Clearly, the manufacture of bronze from tin/copper at the onset of civilization is an intricate and tangled historical conundrum. How can we piece together the fact that Stone Age people were called so because they knew nothing about metals, but quickly mined tin/copper and made bronze, an artificial metal?
pparently, they did so not long after they set their stone tools down and began mining this rare ore, we must assume, based upon some lost instinct.
The bronze puzzle is obviously missing many pieces.
They include numerous transitions that involved creating furnaces to control high heat, creating the formula for bronze (tin 10%, copper 85%, trace elements 5% ), then the bronze casting process; in short, the whole technological gambit that went into the strange, yet amazing bronze masks the Sangxiu made 4,000 years ago. (See below Insert)
They have a definite alien look and feel to them. They make look small but they are quite large in fact, taller than an average size person and weighing a hundred pounds on up. The next mystery is reflected in the fact that the site, where the artifacts and ancient ruins were found, sits smack dab on the 30 N. parallel.
I brought this mysterious latitude into focus in a my recent book titled, Ancient Alien Ancestors. This single band, that encircles the earth, just happens to be where the major rivers of the northern hemisphere converge and form deltas before flowing into the sea.
The list includes the Nile, the Tigris-Euphrates, the Yangtze, and the Mississippi River deltas, plus the ancient cities of Cairo, Harappa, Lhasa, Tibet and the Sangiux as well as the Longyou Caves.
Furthermore, equally enigmatic is the fact that the 30 N. latitude is the home of earth’s earliest civilizations, most of which were situated near the above major river deltas! The Egyptian, Sumerian, Indus Valley, and Chinese cultures all emerged along this single, mysterious parallel. (Yet our academics pay attention to it whatsover)
Though conventional historians do note the fact that our earliest civilizations all emerged in the northern hemisphere in these major river valleys, they do not note the 30 N. parallel factor.
Is it a coincidence that this single Latitude runs through the four ancient civilizations all of which defined the Bronze Age, invented crop agriculture, and the first urban centers? I shall not here delve into that question any further since I already have, in the previous work mentioned above, in several chapters.
Suffice it to say that the Sanxingdui culture was part of this unique, exceptional assembly of enigmatic, seminal civilizations. They built pyramids in Egypt; sophisticated ziggurats and cities in Sumer; public baths & homes with indoor plumbing in the Indus Valley; and a walled city in the shape of a trapezoid, unearthed at the (Sanxingdui) excavation site. (I have noted the mysterious significance of the Trapezoid many times)
Archaeological digs at the site revealed evidence of a walled city founded circa, 2000-1,600 BCE. The trapezoidal city had a very long, earthen east wall 2,000 measuring meters in length, a south wall also 2,000 meters in length, and a west wall some 1,600 meters in length all of which enclosed an area of 3.6 km2. The city is said to be similar in scale to the inner city of Zhengzhou Shang ancient urban center.
The city was built on the banks of the Yazi River (Chinese: 涧河; pinyin: Jiān Hé), and enclosed part of its tributary, Mamu River, within the city precinct. The earthen walls were 40 meters (130’) wide at the base and 20 (60’) meters thick at the top, and varied in height from 8–10 (26-30’) meters. In addition, a smaller set of inner walls stood behind the huge, outer walls.
That it was well protected by an immense perimeter wall is an understatement!
Like the Kofun described in an earlier chapter, the outer area beyond the perimeter walls was surrounded by canals 25–20 meters (60’) wide and 2–3 meters (6-10’) deep. These canals were used for multiple purposes: irrigation, inland navigation, defense, and flood control.
The city was well planned being divided into residential, workshop and religious districts assembled around a central axis. It was along this nexus that most of the pits containing the large cache of artifacts were found on four separate terraces.
From the foregoing we can readily appreciate that Sanxingdui culture had city planners, skilled builders and craftsmen, advanced metallurgists, city planners, sculptors and artists, In fact, all the skilled and unskilled workers it takes to create a civilization. All of the foregoing has only come to light in recent years.
This goes to show how little we really know about the ancient past and how much remains still to be discovered!
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