Culture is a social attribute of human beings with supernatural characteristics. Everything that happens in nature except human beings and their activities does not belong to human culture. However, human itself is the product of nature, and human culture is inseparable from nature, and nature is the basis and prerequisite for survival and development.
While providing people with living conditions, nature is also tempering people's will and giving people great pressure. Only by constantly overcoming these pressures can human beings survive and continue to develop. Therefore, at the beginning of human birth, understanding nature and transforming the environment have become the first meaning of human existence and will become a lifelong mission. The means to transform the environment are labor-physical labor and mental labor. In the process of labor, people have created culture and guided themselves to understand and transform nature with the concept of culture.
If human beings can understand nature, they will inevitably have a dynamic effect on the environment; On the contrary, the environment also restricts human beings through the eternal role of natural laws. The subject and object are interrelated, and * * * lives in the living tense of cyclic changes. This is the dynamic relationship between human beings and the natural environment.
In the primitive stage of human beings, the focus of life power is biased towards the natural environment, and people can only be passively controlled by the environment, but can't choose nature independently. Man is basically a slave to the environment. When humans began to learn to plant, raise poultry and build houses, their complete dependence on the natural environment began to change, which means that humans began to have the initiative to survive. From this moment on, the "cultural landscape" created by human beings appeared on the earth one after another.
"Human landscape" is relative to "natural landscape". The latter generally refers to the natural scenery of the surface, which can be divided into regions according to the geomorphological characteristics, such as forest landscape and grassland landscape. The former is a landscape created by human beings consciously using nature.
The emergence of cultural landscape is very important to human beings. It can make inaccessible places full of vitality, and let people settle and make a living in places without living conditions, such as opening oases in the desert and building irrigation networks in places where Hiderigami is abused. The living space of human beings has been greatly expanded, so there is also greater freedom of survival.
Due to the restriction of natural laws, the creation of cultural landscape is not arbitrary, and it must be created on a certain natural basis. On the one hand, nature provides advantages that are beneficial to human beings, and these advantages may sometimes be insignificant, so human beings try to expand this advantage until they can survive and develop; On the other hand, nature is an objective force different from consciousness, and it has its own "Tao" and "reason". Even the cultural landscape that is relatively independent of nature is still subject to the ecological laws of nature. Human beings must obey and follow this law, or they will be mercilessly retaliated by nature.
From ancient times to the present, no matter how light or heavy human dependence on geographical environment and nature is, natural laws and geographical factors will have a certain impact on human beings. Therefore, to study the early history and cultural origin of human beings, we must consider geographical and environmental factors.
Geographical factors and natural factors undoubtedly have a very important impact on human survival, especially human survival. Even in the early days of human society, the geographical environment indirectly affected people's psychology, and the effect was obvious. However, the geographical environment is outside the society after all. When human society develops to a certain stage, the influence of geographical environment will not occupy the main position. In other words, for the development of human society and the formation of national character, geographical environment is a factor, but it is not the only factor, let alone the leading factor. In view of this, when introducing the cultural function of geography, we will take "humanized natural-cultural landscape" as the corresponding factor, and at the same time focus on the early history of mankind.
For a long time, people regarded the Yellow River Basin as the cradle of China culture. However, according to the archaeological practice in recent decades, it has been proved that not only the Yellow River Basin, the Liaohe River Basin, the Yangtze River Basin, the Huaihe River Basin and the Pearl River Basin have a 45,000-year history of civilization, but also the cradle of Chinese culture.
From the perspective of cultural psychology, human culture came into being in the Neolithic Age. Restricted by the level of production development, the river has become the mother of human culture. Almost all the typical Neolithic cultural sites in China are located in the great rivers and their tributaries, such as Yangshao culture, Longshan culture, Dawenkou culture and Qijia culture in the Yellow River basin, Qingliangang culture in the Huaihe River basin, Liangzhu culture, Qujialing culture and Daxi culture in the Yangtze River basin, Hongshan Culture culture in the Liaohe River basin and South Indian pottery culture in the Pearl River basin (partially).
The characteristics of early cultural areas distributed in large river basins exist in ancient oriental civilizations, which makes ancient civilizations have a kind of * * *, but the characteristics of agricultural origin in China are different from other ancient civilizations after all. Babylonia in the two river basins and Egypt in the Nile basin generally use the fertile soil left by the floods of big rivers to irrigate, plant wheat and develop agriculture. However, the river on which life depends is unique: the Nile flows alone, and there is only one climate in the two river basins. Most other places are desert and semi-desert areas, and no other rivers complement each other. Therefore, these areas with ancient civilizations rely heavily on big rivers, such as Egypt. Until modern times, almost all the population concentrated areas were concentrated on both sides of the Nile. So some people say that "Egypt is a gift from the Nile".
Although China culture originated from the big river basin, it is not limited to the fertile soil endowed by the big river because of its complex terrain and various planting varieties. At the same time, because there are five major water systems in the north and south echoing each other from afar, Tianjin is intensively supported, which facilitates national migration and cultural exchanges. Especially when the ancient land transportation was underdeveloped, it was more important to use river transportation. In the Neolithic Age, the mutual infiltration of various cultural regions was due to the distribution characteristics of Chinese rivers.