A Portrayal of Ancient Teeth-chiselled People: a Textual Research of the Property of Human Heads with Tusks on Jade Carving

—with a Discussion of the Contradiction between the Prehistoric Custom of Tooth Extraction in Eastern and Southern China and the Image of Ancient Teeth-chiselled People

Wang Hui

     The cases of tooth extraction are very common on the bone specimens unearthed from the tombs of the Dawenkou Culture and Longshan Culture (mainly located in middle and south Shandong Province), as well as the Liangzhu Culture (mainly located in south Jiangsu Province, north Zhejiang Province, Anhui Province and Hubei Province). Many scholars correspond such phenomenon with the “teeth-chiselled people” mentioned in ancient literature, and consider they belonged to the “teeth-chiselled” tribe distributed in the ancient Eastern Yi tribes. But the ancient annotations of those literatures also said that the teeth-chiselled people had tusks of five to six feet, or three feet long, which is thought as misrepresentation nowadays. According to the human heads on jade carving unearthed from the tombs of the Longshan Culture or handed down from ancient times, the shapes of long upper and lower tusks often appear at the mouth, and the author judges them to be the portrayal of the teeth-chiselled people in ancient legends, as the custom of tooth extraction echoes with the name of “teeth-chiselled people”, and chiselling or taking off the teeth is for fitting on animal tusks on the corresponding position. The residents lived in the regions of the Dawenkou Culture and the Longshan Culture are just the teeth-chiselled tribes that migrated southward after being defeated by the Yi tribe of the Eastern Yi tribes as described in ancient literature.