Shimao Pyramid

38.5657°N, 110.3252°E.

The Shimao Pyramid in Shenmu, northern Shaanxi Province, China — the central monument of a fortified Neolithic city built between approximately 2300 BCE and 1800 BCE on the loess plateau north of the Great Wall. The pyramid is a stepped stone platform 70 metres tall on a base of approximately 250 metres per side, rising in 11 graduated terraces and built of dressed stone blocks set into rammed-earth fill — the largest stone Neolithic structure known from anywhere in China. The site was identified in 1976 and large-scale excavation began in 2011 under the Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Archaeology, revealing a fortified city of approximately 4 square kilometres with stone defensive walls 9 metres high, an elaborate jade industry, an earlier-than-expected musical instrument tradition (carved bone flutes), and human sacrificial deposits set into the masonry of the city walls. The Shimao culture predates and significantly outscales the early Bronze Age Erlitou polity in the Yellow River valley conventionally identified with the legendary Xia dynasty.

A pyramid older than Stonehenge, in a stone city in northern China, by a civilisation whose name and language are unrecorded.