Chinese Carving and Writing May date to 15000 BC

Through out China's history carving objects found in nature has been a major art form for thousands of years. Up until the 1980's, scholars believed the earliest carvings were done on pottery in the Henan Province, long thought to be the origin of Chinese culture and formal history. Slightly more recent ones have been long known executed on tortoise shells as well as bones.

15,000 to 10,000 BC Chinese Pictographs

Then the unimaginable happened, a slew of carvings were found in in northwest China's Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region in Damaidi at Beishan Mountain in inner Mongolia. Over 10,000 pictographs, found by archaeologists, worked in stone which may (will) end up re-writing the history books on the origins of Chinese characters. This new discovery indicates the basics of Chinese writing my be 7,000 to 10,000 years older than previously thought and may date back to 15,000 BC.

From those early beginnings of petroglyphs found on mountain tops as well as in valleys along sheer steep vertical walls of flat rocks, they are now considered clearly to be masculine as well as feminine in nature and formed what is clearly a precursor to later Chinese writing and symbols evolving into today's Chinese script. Within many they have found the key elements of later scripts melded carved in other objects. The images include heavenly bodies, hunting scenes, tribal life and many no yet deciphered.

Happily , so far they have been successful in keeping out the tomb robbers and cultural thieves giving scientists a chance to preserve one of the greatest cultural discovery's in a century.