Hi everybody, I'm Patrick Weimann, thanks for joining me today.

Welcome to Tides of History.

China's past goes back a long, long way, but for most of us educated in North America

or Europe, we didn't get much of that past in our early studies.

Maybe a mention of Pekingman and R.K.A.

commonings in East Asia, maybe a little on the beginnings of the Chindinasty, a few check-ins

in the past couple of millennia, but definitely nothing on the thousands of years preceding

China's first unification.

This is a huge and frankly unforgettable oversight.

China was home to not one, but multiple inventions of agriculture, the growth of language families

that still define the world today, and not least one of the world's few pristine inventions

of the state.

That's what we're going to focus on today, and we have a fantastic guest to help us learn

more about it.

Professor Lee Liu is one of the world's leading experts on the archaeology of Neolithic

and Bronze Age China.

She's the Sir Robert Houtong Professor in Chinese archaeology at Stanford University

and the author of several books, including the archaeology of China from the late Paleolithic

to the early Bronze Age, which I highly recommend to you, and the Chinese Neolithic,

projectories to early states, along with a staggering number of book chapters and journal

articles.

Her most recent work looks at the early brewing of alcohol around the world.

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