page_title: Miao people
section_title: Archaeological discoveries
hierarchical_section_title: Miao people / History / Archaeological discoveries
caption_attribution_description: A Chinese silken banner section with a painted design of a sacrificial offering to the deceased, excavated from a tomb at Changsha, Hunan province, dated to the Western Han Dynasty (202 BC – 9 AD).
context_page_description: The Miao are a minority ethnic group living in southern China, and are recognized by the government of China as one of the 56 official ethnic groups. Miao is a Chinese term, while the component groups of people, which include Hmong, Hmu, Xong, and A-Hmao, may have their own self-designations.
  The different peoples in the "Miao" group may not necessarily be either linguistically or culturally related, though the majority are members of Miao-Yao language family, which includes the Hmong, Hmub, Xong and A-Hmao dialetcs and the majority do share cultural similarities. Many Miao groups cannot communicate with each other in their native tongues and have different histories and cultures. Many groups designated as Miao do not even agree that they belong to the ethnic group, though some Miao groups, such as the Hmong do agree with the collective grouping as a single ethnic group – Miao.
  The Miao live primarily in southern China's mountains, in the provinces of Guizhou, Yunnan, Sichuan, Hubei, Hunan, Guangxi, Guangdong and Hainan. Some sub-groups of the Miao, most notably the Hmong people, have migrated out of China into Southeast Asia.
context_section_description: According to André-Georges Haudricourt and David Strecker's claims based on limited secondary data, the Miao were among the first people to settle in present-day China.  They claim that the Han borrowed a lot of words from the Miao in regard to rice farming.  This indicated that the Miao were among the first rice farmers in China.  In addition, some have connected the Miao to the Daxi Culture (5,300 – 6,000 years ago) in the middle Yangtze River region. The Daxi Culture has been credited with being amongst the first cultivators of rice in the Far East by Western scholars.  However, in 2006 rice cultivation was found to have existed in the Shandong province even earlier than the Daxi Culture. Though the Yuezhuang culture has cultivated rice, it is more of collected wild rice and not actual cultivated and domesticated rice like that of the Daxi.
  A western study mention that the Miao (especially the Miao-Hunan) have some DNA from the Northeast people of China, but has origins in southern china.  Recent DNA samples of Miao males contradict this theory.  The White Hmong have 25% C, 8% D, & 6% N(Tat) yet they have the least contact with the Han population.
caption: A Western Han painting on silk near Changsha in Hunan province.
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