Shanghai is much older than most people think, a group of archaeologists announced yesterday.
The researchers say artifacts excavated from a site in Songjiang District indicate the city's earliest migrants probably come from Henan Province some 4,000 years ago.
Many local residents consider Shanghai to be a very young city by Chinese standards with a history of only 200 years.
"The unearthed artifacts show that about 4,000 years ago a group of migrants came to the city," Song Jian, head of the archaeological section of the Shanghai Cultural Relics Management Commission, said yesterday.
During three years of working intermittently at the Guangfulin site, researchers unearthed dozens of artifacts including pottery containers, stone ploughs and kilns for food storage.
Researchers conducted extensive tests to authenticate the age and origin of the artifacts. They concluded that the artifacts were imported from central China where Henan Province is now located.
"The most important hint we can get from the findings is that Shanghai's evolvement, similar to the geologic formation of the Earth's crust, has merged lots of outlying people and cultures for a really long time," said Gu Xiaoming, a history professor at Fudan University.