Oracle bones are pieces of bone or turtle plastron (underside) bearing the answers to divination chiefly during the late Shang Dynasty. They were heated and cracked, then typically inscribed using a bronze pin in what is known as oracle bone script. The oracle bones are the earliest known significant corpus of ancient Chinese writing, and contain important historical information such as the complete royal genealogy of the Shāng dynasty. These records confirmed the existence of the Shāng dynasty, which some scholars, until then, had doubted ever existed.
The oracle bones are mostly tortoise plastrons (ventral or belly shells, probably female) and ox scapulae (shoulder blades), although some are the carapace (dorsal or back shells) of tortoises, and a few are ox rib bones, scapulae of sheep, boars, horses and deer, and some other animal bones. The skulls of deer, ox skulls and human skulls have also been found with inscriptions on them, although these are very rare, and appear to have been inscribed for record-keeping or practice rather than for actual divination; in one case inscribed deer antlers are reported, but Keightley (1978) reports that they are fake. Neolithic diviners in
