RESEARCH

◥ the lake level could not exceed 1975 m asl (25 to TECHNICAL RESPONSE 50 m lower than we reconstruct) due to a low divide upstream of the dam (3); however, Han’s datum is obtained from Google Earth, whereas ARCHAEOLOGY a more accurate 1:50,000 topographic map shows that it is ~2010 m asl, within our range. More- over, the sharp crest at this site suggests that it Response to Comments on “Outburst mayhavebeenloweredbymasswastingoverthe past 4000 years. flood at 1920 BCE supports Huang et al.(4) argue that there is no sedi- mentary evidence to support the maximum level historicity of China’s Great Flood of the dammed lake. This is true because the lake with level above 1890 m asl only existed for a few months, and at its peak (~2000 to 2025 m and the Xia dynasty” asl), only for a few days, too short to leave behind sediments that would have survived subsequent Qinglong Wu,1,2* Zhijun Zhao,1,2 Li Liu,3† Darryl E. Granger,4 Hui Wang,5 subaerial exposure. The lacustrine (not fluvial) sediments in Jishi Gorge represent the remnant David J. Cohen,6† Xiaohong Wu,7 Maolin Ye,5 Ofer Bar-Yosef,8 Bin Lu,9 Jin Zhang,10 lake, which persisted long after the breach and Peizhen Zhang,11 Daoyang Yuan,12 Wuyun Qi,5 Linhai Cai,13 Shibiao Bai1,2 was gradually filled in (1).

Lacustrine sediment in Jishi Gorge was previ- Downloaded from Wu et al., Han, and Huang et al. question our reconstruction of a large outburst flood ously dated to ~8000 to 5500 years before the and its possible relationship to China’s Great Flood and the Xia dynasty. Here, we clarify present (B.P.) [e.g., (9, 10)] using optically stimu- misconceptions concerning geologic evidence of the flood, its timing and magnitude, lated luminescence (OSL) and radiocarbon. How- and the complex social-cultural response. We also further discuss how this flood may be ever, due to incomplete bleaching, OSL ages may related to ancient accounts of the Great Flood and origins of the Xia dynasty. be considerably older than their true depositional ages. Also, because total organic carbon samples http://science.sciencemag.org/ ur discovery of a tremendous outburst itistheonlyplaceintheadjacentupperYellow [e.g., (10)] may include older carbon, and because flood of the , which can pos- River watershed with the appropriate rock types. charcoal samples may have been redeposited (i.e., siblybetiedtoChina’sGreatFloodlegend We did not, as suggested by (4), confuse the they are in secondary deposits after having been (1), has provoked controversy among schol- OFS with landslide deposits (Fig. 1) or the typical moved postdepositionally by water), they only O 14 ars, represented by the three Comments fluvial gravel of the Yellow River [Fig. 2F in (4)]. provide a maximum C age (or terminus post by Wu et al., Han, and Huang et al.(2–4)towhich On the other hand, the well-sorted coarse sand quem) for the lake sediment, as we demonstrate we respond here. bed (Fig. 1E) [figure 2G in (4)] misidentified as in (1). The younger charcoal material (2020 to Outburst flood sediments (OFS) described in a tributary flash flood deposit in (4)bearsabun- 1056 BCE, calibrated) within the dammed-lake (1) provide direct evidence of the flood but have dant greenschist clasts and is actually OFS. sediments (1) therefore supersedes these previous been overlooked or misinterpreted by (2–4). At Contrary to Comments (2, 4), we did notice the limiting ages [e.g., (9, 10)] and provides a closer

the site, OFS are deposited over the ground red mud beds at the Lajia site [figures S1 and S5C boundary. on February 22, 2019 surface, filled in collapsed cave dwellings, and in (1)],whichareeasilydistinguishablefromOFS. The estimation of maximum discharges both at even are found within pottery vessels [fig. S5 in We never took the red mud matrix surrounding the dam and the Lajia site are questioned by Han (1)]. Previous studies (5, 6) called the OFS “black some skeletal remains [figure 1, G and I, in (4)] (3). We note that the first five formulas in table sands” and took them to be sand boils from earth- as OFS as Huang et al.note(4). Previous studies S3 in (1) are empirical equations mainly based on quake liquefaction or gully flood deposits. How- (5, 6) wrongly identified the red muds as deposits relatively small outburst floods and that all are ever, these “black sands,” with abundant greenschist from extreme flooding of the Yellow River induced based on logarithmic regressions through data and little quartz, are very different from other by climate change and also as responsible for de- with a spread of >0.3 log units at 95% confidence. Yellow River sedimentary deposits, which contain stroying the Lajia settlement. Actually, the red mud The uncertainty in any particular model is thus a abundant quartz but almost no greenschist. They beds are locally derived from mudflows (7, 8)or factor of two or more at 95% confidence. As for couldonlyhaveoriginatedinJishiGorge,because gully floods that occurred at Lajia before, during, Han’s challenge of our estimation of the maxi- and after the occupation period. We mum discharge with the Ritter formula (3), we 1School of Geography Science, Nanjing Normal University, simply did not discuss the mudflow deposits over- clearly explained our rationale that this is a max- Nanjing 210023, China. 2Jiangsu Center for Collaborative lying the OFS (1) because they are unrelated to imum estimate (1). The peak stage of an outburst Innovation in Geographic Information Resource Development and the outburst flood. flood, especially for those from natural landslide 3 Application, Nanjing, Jiangsu 210023, China. Department of East Wu et al.(2) argue that the skeletons within the dams, is not transient, so that Manning’sformula Asia Languages and Cultures, Stanford University, CA 94305, USA. 4Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary houses at the Lajia site show in situ burial fea- is applicable in estimating the peak discharges of Sciences, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907, USA. tures instead of “flooding burial scenarios.” We outburst floods. To avoid overestimating the peak 5Institute of Archaeology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, are arguing that the collapsed cave dwellings discharge, we deduct the portion AE of the cross 6 Beijing 100710, China. Department of Anthropology, National buried the victims during the earthquake, pro- section near Lajia [figure S6C in (1)], which likely Taiwan University, 10617, Taiwan, R.O.C. 7School of Archaeology and Museology, Peking University, Beijing 100871, tecting their buried remains from reworking by eroded after this outburst flood. China. 8Department of Anthropology, Harvard University, the outburst flood ~6 to 9 months later. Han obtained an empirical attenuation equa- Cambridge, MA 01238, USA. 9China Coal Technology & Engineering Han (3)andHuanget al.(4) seem to have been tion for discharge of outburst floods from pub- ’ 10 Group Corp Xian Research Institute, Xi an 710077, China. Institute confounded by the maximum lake level at the time lished data, and, using it, he calculates discharge of Geology, Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences, Beijing 3 –1 100037, China. 11School of Earth Science and Geological of flooding [2000 to 2025 m above sea level (asl)] at the Lajia site as 10,800 m s (3). This value Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou 510275, China. versus the level of the remnant lake (~1890 m asl) can be falsified right away because it is too small 12Lanzhou Institute of Seismology, China Earthquake Administration, that persisted after the dam failure. We recon- to reach the height of the observed OFS (1). The 13 Lanzhou 730000, China. Provincial Institute of Cultural struct the level of the initial landslide dam from reliability of his equation (3) can also be disproven Relics and Archaeology, Xining 810007, China. *Corresponding author. Email: [email protected] its remnants preserved on the left bank of the by comparison with a well-gauged large outburst †These authors contributed equally to this work. Yellow River [figure S2A in (1)]. Han argues that flood (11)(Fig.2).

Wu et al., Science 355, 1382e (2017) 31 March 2017 1of3 RESEARCH | TECHNICAL RESPONSE

Wu et al.(2)andHan(3) criticize us for ne- glecting a recently refined date of 1750 BCE for the beginning of the Erlitou culture (17). The Erlitou culture refers to an assemblage of mate- rial remains distributed across many sites in cen- tral China. The Erlitou site—its type site—became the largest center of this culture, but the site itself dates later than the earliest sites of this regional culture. Carbonized seeds from Erlitou culture de- posits at the Huizui site, 15 km from the Erlitou site, for example, have yielded calibrated radio- carbon dates of ~1900 BCE (18). Thus, the ~1750 BCE date can represent the beginning of the Erlitou site yet not the start of the Erlitou culture. Of course, further systematic dating of other sites is needed. Citing (19), Han (3) also argues that the appear- ance of bronze vessels at the Erlitou site after ~1700 BCE marks the beginning of the in China. We would emphasize that the

earliest cast bronze is seen in knives from the Downloaded from in the Upper Yellow River re- gion by the end of the third millennium BCE, and small-scale copper-based metallurgy (includ- ing bronze casting) flourished in Xinjiang and by ~2000 to 1800 BCE (20–22). Although Erlitou bronzes mark the appearance of large- http://science.sciencemag.org/ scale casting under elite patronage (23), this is only one aspect of a larger process of sociopolitical change that begins earlier. We would expect the Xia dynasty to have appeared as part of this pro- cess of state formation. Wu et al.(2)andHan(3) reject that the out- burst flood supports the historicity of China’sGreat Flood and the Xia dynasty. Our considerations are based on both the uniqueness and the magnitude Fig. 1. Photos of OFS in Jishi Gorge and in the Guanting Basin, in comparison with landslide of the flood and its timing: It was exceptionally

large and rare, with no similarly devastating flood deposits. (A) Landscape of Jishi Gorge ~1.3 km downstream from the landslide dam (from Google Earth), on February 22, 2019 in which B and C represent the locations of OFS and landslide deposition in (B)and(C), respectively. The events ever occurring again during the historical center of this figure is located at 35°50.3′N, 102°37.3′E. (B) OFS seated on the valley slope [located at P8 in period. Thus, it is the only geological candidate figure 1 in (1)]. The OFS here is devoid of greenschist clasts because it is upstream from the greenschist yet found for the origin of China’s Great Flood. bedrock. (C) Outcrop of landslide deposit [the same as that in figure 2E in (4)]. (D) Outcrop of OFS fan east The early textual record closely associates three to the outlet of Jishi Gorge. (E) Coarse sandy OFS buried by mudflow deposits in the Guanting Basin [at events: the Great Flood, Yu’s control of the flood, locationP12infigure1Ain(1)]. and the establishment of the Xia dynasty. If the Jishi outburst flood demonstrates the historic- ity of China’s Great Flood story, it would also Wu et al.(2) suggest that the radiocarbon data the most reliable. Wu et al.’s(2)beliefthatthe lend greater credence to the historicity of the Xia for the bone samples in (1) were incorrectly av- Great Flood lasted more than 100 years is rooted dynasty. eraged. Inverse variance weighting is a standard in later legend. On a related note, the earliest Wu et al.argue(2) that the Xia people lived in method for combining radiocarbon determina- written record concerning Yu is an inscription on central China; this view is supported by a major- tions (12), and its margin of error can be smaller a bronze vessel dating to the Western Zhou dynas- ity of archaeologists in China who link the Xia than those of the original multiple samples. Using ty (~900 BCE) (14) and not to the Warring States totheErlitouculture(24). Where the Xia people OxCal 4.2 with the IntCal13 calibration curve (13), period (475 to 221 BCE), as argued by Han (3). originated before Erlitou is less agreed upon, with the result of 3573 ± 18 years B.P. (1 s)yieldsa Wu et al.(2) also criticize us for excluding cli- contrasting interpretations [e.g., (24, 25)], but many calibrated age range of 1941 to 1896 BCE (68.2%) mate change as a possible cause. However, the ear- archaeologists see the Erlitou culture, and thus and 1974 to 1882 BCE (94.9%), or 1922 ± 28 BCE liest classical accounts of the Flood, in the Shujing Xia, as originating in the Late Henan (68.2%) as a Gaussian approximation. To sim- (Book of Documents, approximately mid-first [e.g., (24)]. However, such lin- plify further discussions, we chose to use 1920 millennium BCE) and Shiji, contain no mention of ear, pottery typology–based views ignore wider- BCE as a shorthand to indicate the approximate heavy rains. Furthermore, lake sediment pollen- ranging processes of multiregional interaction date of the flood, but the uncertainty of ±28 years based reconstruction of annual precipitation in thought to contribute to the origins of civilization (1 s) remains implicit. northern China (15) and speleothem oxygen iso- in China (26). Han argues (3)thatwedidnotpre- The duration of 22 years for China’s Great tope records in southern China (16)bothshowa sent any direct evidence for Yu’sterritoryandthe Flood that we adopt is according to Shiji (Records decline of the summer monsoon during ~4200 to Xia dynasty, but such issues fall outside the scope of the Grand Historian,bySimaQian,firstcen- 3900 years B.P. So far as we know, there is no of our geological paper. We would, however, ar- tury BCE), which places it only in the lives of the convincing archaeological or geological evidence gue that the modern-day notions of territoriality father-son pair of Gun and Yu. This duration is of repeated disastrous meteorological floods in behind his Comment do not fit the nature of subject to debate, but it is traditionally considered the Yellow River valley around 4000 years ago. sociopolitical structures in the early Bronze Age.

Wu et al., Science 355, 1382e (2017) 31 March 2017 2of3 RESEARCH | TECHNICAL RESPONSE

4. C. C. Huang et al., Science 355, 1382 (2017). 5. X. Y. Yang, thesis, Peking University, Beijing (2003) [in Chinese]. 6. X. Y. Yang, Z. K. Xia, M. L. Ye, Chin. Sci. Bull. 48, 1877–1881 (2003). 7. P. Tarasov, M. Wagner, In Studies of Eastern Archaeology II, Shandong University Oriental Archaeology Research Center, Ed. (Science Press, Beijing, 2006), pp. 263–271 [in Chinese]. 8. C. C. Huang et al., Holocene 23, 1584–1595 (2013). 9. Y. Z. Zhang et al., Holocene 25,745–757 (2015). 10. G. H. Dong et al., Quat. Res. 81, 445–451 (2014). 11. L. Leng, Hydrology 20,46–50 (2000) [in Chinese]. 12. G. K. Ward, S. R. Wilson, Archaeometry 20,19–31 (1978). 13. University of Oxford, OxCal/ORAU; https://c14.arch.ox.ac.uk/ oxcal/OxCal.html. 14. X. Q. Li, Zhongguo Lishi Wenwu 6,4–12 (2002) [in Chinese]. 15. F. Chen et al., Sci. Rep. 5, 11186 (2015). 16. Y. Wang et al., Science 308, 854–857 (2005). 17. X. L. Zhang et al., Kaogu 8, 746–761 (2007) [in Chinese]. 18. G.-A. Lee, S. Bestel, Bull. Indo-Pac. Prehist. Assoc. 27,49–60 (2007). 19. H. Xu, in Essays from the 2015 International Symposium on Fig. 2. Testing the flood propagation equation in (3) with a gauged outburst flood along the the Qijia culture and Huaxia Civilization, Guanghe, China, – 11 ′ N. C. Zhu et al., Ed. (Wen Wu Press, Beijing, 2016), pp. 123 132 Yalong-Yangtze Rivers in China in 1967 ( ). The related landslide dam is located at 29°24.5 N, [in Chinese]. 101°7.5′E. It reveals that the equation (3) severely overestimates flood pulse attenuation. 20. L. Liu, X. C. Chen, The : From the Late Paleolithic to the Early Bronze Age (Cambridge Univ. Press, Downloaded from During the (~1550 to 1046 BCE), part of the establishment of what some scholars New York, 2012). – for example, and thus perhaps during the Xia, arenowcallingtheproto–Silk Road (29). Multi- 21. L. G. Fitzgerald-Huber, Early China 20,17 67 (1995). 22. X. T. Liu, Zhongyuan Wenwu 4,51–57 (2012) [in Chinese]. polities were defined through kinship relations disciplinary perspectives are needed to shed new 23. R. Bagley, in The Cambridge History of Ancient China,M.Loewe, andsharedreligiousandotherculturalpractices. light on such issues as the effect of the flood on E. L. Shaughnessy, Eds. (Cambridge Univ. Press, New York, States like the Shang were likely not demarcated the regional Qijia culture and the connections be- 1999), pp. 124–231. by claims to fixed territories such as the borders tween Qijia and the late Neolithic and early Bronze 24. The Institute of Archaeology of Chinese Academy of Social Science, Chinese Archaeology: Xia and Shang (Chinese Social http://science.sciencemag.org/ that are used to define modern nation-states (27). Age cultures, such as Erlitou, in the Central Plains; Sciences Press, Beijing, 2003), pp. 21–60 [in Chinese]. Han’s(3) requirement of defining a delimited the direct effects of the flood on the Middle and 25. H. Yi, Acad. Mon, 46, 134–144 (2014) [in Chinese]. territory for the Xia also does not fit descrip- Lower Yellow River regions; and the interpreta- 26. K. C. Chang, The Archaeology of Ancient China (Yale Univ. Press, tions in the textual record, such as the Shiji,of tion of the textual record and the historical geo- New Haven and London, ed. 4, 1986). 27. D. Keightley, in D. Keightley, Ed., The Origins of Chinese Civilization thewide-rangingeffortsofYuacrossmanylands graphy of places associated with the flood, the (Univ. of California Press, Berkeley, 1983), pp. 523–564. in taming the flood and bringing them into both exploits of Yu, and the Xia dynasty. 28. M. E. Lewis, The Flood Myths of Early China (State Univ. of a cosmological and political order (28). Inthemeanwhile,wethankthesecommenters New York Press, 2006). Although we hypothesize a linkage between and other researchers who have commented on 29. S. C. Li, in Essays from the 2015 International Symposium ’ on the Qijia culture and Huaxia Civilization, Guanghe, China, the Jishi outburst flood and the Great Flood of our paper; such discussions deepen everyone s N. C. Zhu et al., Ed. (Wen Wu Press, Beijing, 2016), pp. 105–109 ancient China and the founding of the Xia dy- understanding. We hope that our discovery stim- [in Chinese].

nasty (1), more research is required to draw fur- ulates further cooperative research combining on February 22, 2019 ther conclusions. Such research must consider archaeology, geology, history, and other relevant ACKNOWLEDGMENTS that the outburst flood occurs in the Qijia culture disciplines to more clearly reveal the complex This research was supported by the Priority of Academic Program Development of Jiangsu Higher Education Institutions and the region. Although this is outside of Central China, trajectory of the origins of Chinese civilization. National Science Foundation of China (no. 41271017). Q.W., Z.Z., traditionally seen as the homeland of the Xia, this L.L., D.E.G., and D.J.C. wrote the manuscript and prepared location and the Qijia culture were also key in this the figures. REFERENCES AND NOTES time period as important conduits for the east- 1. Q. Wu et al., Science 353, 579–582 (2016). ward transmission of bronze metallurgy (21, 22) 2. W. Wu, J. Dai, Y. Zhou, Q. Ge, Science 355,1382(2017). 17 October 2016; accepted 15 February 2017 and for cultural contact with Central Asia as 3. J.-C. Han, Science 355, 1382 (2017). 10.1126/science.aal1325

Wu et al., Science 355, 1382e (2017) 31 March 2017 3of3 Response to Comments on ''Outburst flood at 1920 BCE supports historicity of China's Great Flood and the Xia dynasty'' Qinglong Wu, Zhijun Zhao, Li Liu, Darryl E. Granger, Hui Wang, David J. Cohen, Xiaohong Wu, Maolin Ye, Ofer Bar-Yosef, Bin Lu, Jin Zhang, Peizhen Zhang, Daoyang Yuan, Wuyun Qi, Linhai Cai and Shibiao Bai

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