Food and Environment in Early and Medieval China. E. N. Anderson

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      Yet another important aspect of taste in Asia is the recent discovery of the umami taste receptors. Previously, human taste had been considered to consist only of salt, sweet, sour, bitter, and—if it is counted a taste rather than a burning sensation—hotness or piquancy. Umami, which was not recognized by either Western or Eastern sages, was discovered only in recent decades. It is the savory taste of soy sauce and other ferments. It is found in some other products, largely as a fermentation product. In spite of not being identified earlier, it was extremely important in the development of East Asian food, since fermentation has been a major way of preparing and preserving food, and the umami taste has been a major goal of food preparation for gourmet taste (H. Huang 2000).

      All these cases show the importance of the relationship between physical tasting ability and food culture. It is impossible to understand Chinese foodways without a solid awareness of these complex and detailed genetically guided human abilities.

       A Bit About Languages

      Languages spread from centers to far-flung regions. When modern humans came out of Africa, they brought languages with them, and some linguists claim to find commonalities in all world languages outside of southern Africa. The evidence is elusive, and so far unconvincing to most, but the human radiation was real, so linguistic relationships must have once been there.

      Failing proto-world, there is considerable suggestive evidence that all or most of the northern Eurasian languages have some distant relationship (Pagel et al. 2013). “Nostratic phylum” has been proposed as the term for these northern Eurasian languages (and some North American ones) if they are indeed related. The resemblances could be due to borrowing across tens of thousands of years, because the steppes have been a highway since Neanderthal times. But there is no reason to reject common origin out of hand. Evidence may someday resolve the issue.

      Today, the world’s languages are grouped into a large number of families and combined in a somewhat smaller but still impressive number of phyla. Typical families are Germanic, Romance, and Sinitic (Chinese). Typical phyla are Indo-European, which includes most European languages and many Asian ones, and Tibeto-Burman, or Sino-Tibetan, which includes Chinese, Tibetan, Burman, and hundreds of related but extremely disparate languages in eastern and southern Asia. Many languages, including Basque, have no known relatives; Basque is its own tiny family and phylum.

      A recent theory, developed from East Asian data, relates the spread of agriculture to the spread of language phyla. This theory was developed by Peter Bellwood to account for the dramatic spread of the Austronesian phylum (see Bellwood 2009, with critiques by other scholars appended). Beginning around 6,000 years ago, Austronesian speakers began to move outward from southeast China. They colonized Taiwan, evolving there into the so-called Taiwan Aborigines.” This was only the beginning. Taking to the sea, the Austronesians exploded over the vast realms of the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Today, somewhat closely related Austronesian languages are spoken from Madagascar to Hawai‘i and from New Zealand to Micronesia. Wherever these people went, they took agriculture. Cognate words for chickens, coconuts, root crops, and dozens of other agricultural items and techniques are found all over their vast realm, indicating that the early Austronesians had all these things.

      It occurred to Bellwood, and to other scholars, that other linguistic spreads might also be associated with agriculture. This has been the subject of much research, culminating in a volume edited by Bellwood and Colin Renfrew (2002). Independent genetic evidence confirms that many migrations occurred and that agriculture released spectacular demographic expansions. Agricultural peoples moved rapidly from the Near East through Europe and into Africa, expanding in numbers as they did so. Evidence from Europe, Southeast Asia, and western Africa confirms striking demographic expansions directly after the introduction of agriculture in these regions (Gignoux et al. 2011). Farmers multiplied fast and moved out to new lands. Local people were not wiped out but rather merged with the expanding farmers, leaving varying degrees of genetic admixture.

      Of course, not all linguistic spreads were accompanied by farming. The Inuit, Athapaskans, and several other hunting peoples spread over thousands of miles without benefit of agriculture. Moreover, having agriculture does not guarantee spread; the Georgian-language speakers have probably had agriculture almost since it began, 11,000 years ago, but have remained confined to a tiny area in the Caucasus. Within eastern Asia, the Yao-Mian phylum has recently spread from southeast China into Southeast Asia, but before that it seems to have been narrowly confined to a small part of south China. The Miao-Hmong phylum started in northwest China, according to some Miao myths. It survives in central and south China, with recent radiation into northern Southeast Asia. It has certainly spread with agriculture but has never gained much territory.

      But some groups do spread. Bellwood and others have made a very convincing case for the association of the Tibeto-Burman (Sino-Tibetan) language phylum with the spread of millet agriculture. The dates and geography make this seem reasonable. The Tibeto-Burman languages, including the ancestor of the Chinese languages of today, are about as different as you would expect if they branched off from each other 7,000 or 8,000 years ago. I find the association convincing, but it is controversial. G. Van Driem thinks the stock originated in Sichuan (van Driem 1999, 2002). Others (myself included) think it originated further north but then differentiated in Sichuan. Either way, the stock originated very close to the point of origin of millet agriculture.

      The spread of the Thai-Kadai phylum is clearly associated with the spread of rice agriculture (Bellwood and Renfrew 2002). We know that Thai-Kadai languages diversified in, and probably spread from, the Yangzi Valley area, where rice was domesticated. Their routes of spread and the probable timing of the spread fit well with the spread of rice agriculture south and southwest. The Austronesian phylum was associated with rice agriculture early and has some very Thai-sounding words; it may be related to Thai-Kadai (P. Benedict 1975), or, more likely, it simply may have become connected with rice agriculture and a few loanwords in very early times. The Thai-Kadai languages branched from each other perhaps 6,000 years ago. Their speakers were, however, probably not the only rice-growers, and Hmong/Miao and Yao/Mien languages were in the right area then, too, and have been associated with the spread of rice by some scholars.

      A significant fact is the spread of the Thai root for “chicken,” kai. This word was borrowed into Chinese early, becoming ji in Mandarin but remaining kai in Cantonese. (The Cantonese language is likely the result of Thai speakers switching to Chinese in the Tang Dynasty and since. The Cantonese word for “chicken” is far from the only Thai-sounding word in that language.) Not stopping there, kai went on—increasingly distorted—into Korean, Japanese, the Central Asian languages, and thence into the Western world, eventually as far afield as Morocco (Blench 2007). It is awfully hard to escape the conclusion that the Thai peoples domesticated the chicken, which is native to south China and Southeast Asia. Borrowed words surely indicate borrowed chickens. Other local peoples in Southeast Asia, such as the Austronesians, have their own words for the bird, implying that they were aware of wild chickens before domestication.

      Bellwood’s correlation of advanced agriculture with the spread of the Austronesian languages in the islands east of Asia is no longer controversial. Millet reached Taiwan by 3,000–2500 BCE; a recent find revealed large amounts of foxtail millet and rice at Nan-kuan-li. This and related sites probably represent the ancestors of today’s Austronesian-speaking “aborigines” of Taiwan, recently arrived from south China with seeds in hand (Tsang 2005). There is clear archaeological evidence for an explosive radiation of advanced farming and pottery-making people from south China to Taiwan and thence to the Philippines and the islands south and east—the lands inhabited by Austronesian peoples today (Bellwood 1997, 2002, 2005; Donohue and Denham 2010 dispute this, but Bellwood has a very effective answer in the commentary section of their article). However, subsequent profound changes in both language and agriculture took place when Austronesians mingled with Papuans in Melanesia (Paz 2002), with the result that Oceanic Austronesian agriculture looks much more Papuan than Chinese.

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