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Over the past two decades, environmental studies in research on prehistoric China have been gaining popularity and importance. For Northwest China in particular, climate change, especially the so-called ~4.2k BP event has been seen as the main reason for an alleged collapse of Late Neolithic societies and a transition to pastoral-heavy economies and mobile lifeways. Yet, these explanatory models tend to rely on limited archaeological and environmental data and non-contemporaneous historical data, resulting in simplistic causal relationships between environmental changes and social response. This paper re-evaluates the Incipient Bronze Age in China's Northwestern region, discussing evidence for climate change and its exact dates, as well as textual and archaeological evidence. We argue that the old narratives perpetuating the image of a dichotomy between Steppe and Sown are inaccurate, while large-scale models of region-wide subsistence change in response to climate cooling tend to disregard local developments and group-specific responses as well as chronological issues. Focusing on the Xindian and Siwa archaeological phenomena, this paper provides a view into sub-regional responses to this climate event, warning against simplistic broad-brush reconstructions and calling for both a return to archaeological fundamentals and large-scale intensive fieldwork and interdisciplinary studies involving archaeologists, paleobotanists, zooarchaeologists, isotope specialists, and climate scientists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Exploring prehistoric variation in human–environmental interaction is critical for understanding the historical patterns and mechanisms of long-term human–land evolution. In this paper we review the published radiocarbon and optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) data from Late Paleolithic, Neolithic and Bronze Age sites in China, analyze the spatial–temporal distribution of these sites, and compare it with the results of recent paleoclimatic and archaeological studies. We seek to study the trajectory and influencing factors of human–environmental interactions in late prehistoric China. We detect changing patterns in the relationship between humans and the environment during different phases of the prehistoric era in China. Climate change clearly affected the environment of hunter-gatherer groups between 50,000–10,000 BP (before present, defined as 1950AD), and variation in human population in Neolithic China (∼10,000–4000 BP) was likely influenced primarily by the development of agriculture, in addition to substantial climate events. The spatial scale of human settlements expanded in the Bronze Age (∼4000–2200 BP) in a period of cooling climate. During this time the impact of human activities on the environment increased significantly, primarily caused by technological innovations related to the onset of prehistoric transcontinental cultural exchange in Eurasia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]