In recent decades, Chinese archaeologists have published a series of unearthed materials about the origin of Chinese characters earlier than Oracle Bone Inscriptions in Anyang Yin Ruins. These materials mainly refer to the depiction or painting symbols that appeared on pottery in the late primitive society and early historical society, and also include a few symbols engraved on Oracle Bone Inscriptions, jade and stone tools. It can be said that they provide a new basis for explaining the origin of Chinese characters.
Wang, a doctoral supervisor of Zhengzhou University, made a systematic investigation and comparison of the carved symbols on pottery pieces unearthed from more than 9 archaeological and cultural sites in China 100, and thought that the earliest carved symbols in China appeared in Jiahu site in Wuyang, Henan Province, with a history of more than 8,000 years.
As a professional worker, he tried to comprehensively sort out these original materials by comprehensively using scientific methods such as archaeology, ancient Chinese character configuration, comparative philology, scientific archaeology and high-tech means, so as to compare some clues about the occurrence and development of Chinese characters before Shang Dynasty.
However, the situation is not so simple. Except for the existing small-scale materials in Zhengzhou Shangcheng site and Xiaoshuangqiao site (more than 10 cases of Zhu Shutao's early characters in Shang Dynasty have been found in recent years), other symbols before Shang Dynasty are scattered, lack of contact with each other, and most of them are inconsistent with Shang Dynasty characters. There are also some symbols with heavy regional colors and complex backgrounds.
Chinese characters are the most widely used and longest-lived characters in the world.
It is difficult to determine the time when Chinese characters began to appear. The oldest characters we can see today are those carved on Oracle Bone Inscriptions and cast on bronzes in Shang Dynasty. The characters of the Shang dynasty are already very developed, and the earliest time must be far before the Shang dynasty, that is, the Xia dynasty or earlier. It should be around the Neolithic Age four or five thousand years ago.
In the pottery symbols unearthed from Erlitou culture and Dawenkou culture, we can see many pictures and characters similar to the real thing. On this basis, these pictures and characters, as well as ideographic patterns in pottery patterns, evolved into mnemonic characters. Chinese characters are gradually accumulated from scattered and individual characters, and then become a writing system through artificial standardization. According to textual research, the original Chinese characters came into being in the middle of Neolithic Age, and it took about 260 years to develop into a preliminary writing system.