Search

Xiaonanshan is an archaeological site dated to 16.5-13.5 cal kyr BP, situated beside the Ussuri River in China. The lithic assemblages feature microblade debitage, bifacial points and stone adzes, which provide important new materials for this project to explore Neolithisation in the Amur River basin of northeast Asia. Keywords: China, Late Pleistocene, early pottery, microblades, Neolithisation, Introduction In east and northeast Asia, the beginning of the Neolithic is usually connected with the emergence of pottery. The Amur--also known as the Heilongjiang--River basin represents one of the [...]

North-east China occupies an important geographic position for understanding the process of Neolithisation in East Asia. Although archaeologists have long debated the trajectory of change in this region, a lack of intensive survey and excavation has precluded convincing interpretations. This article presents research on the newly excavated sites of Huayang and Taoshan in the southern Lesser Khingan Mountains, with a particular focus on the lithic assemblages. Comparative and environmental analyses demonstrate the largely uniform trajectory of lithic technologies across north-east China and close correspondence with Late Glacial palaeoclimatic and palaeoenvironmental changes. Keywords: China, Huayang, Taoshan, Late Pleistocene, Neolithisation, Introduction The long-term and historically contingent transition from Palaeolithic to Neolithic lifeways--or Neolithisation--has long been a key issue in archaeological studies, and it remains the subject of ongoing debate (e.g. [...]

Levallois approaches are one of the best known variants of prepared-core technologies, and are an important hallmark of stone technologies developed around 300,000 years ago in Africa and west Eurasia.sup.1,2. Existing archaeological evidence suggests that the stone technology of east Asian hominins lacked a Levallois component during the late Middle Pleistocene epoch and it is not until the Late Pleistocene (around 40,000-30,000 years ago) that this technology spread into east Asia in association with a dispersal of modern humans. Here we present evidence of Levallois technology from the lithic assemblage of the Guanyindong Cave site in southwest China, dated to approximately 170,000-80,000 years ago. To our knowledge, this is the earliest evidence of Levallois technology in east Asia. Our findings thus challenge the existing model of the origin and spread of Levallois technologies in east Asia and its links to a Late Pleistocene dispersal of modern humans.Levallois stone-tool technology found at the Guanyindong Cave site in southwest China was dated to approximately 170,000-80,000 years ago, which is much earlier than previously thought., Author(s): Yue Hu [sup.1] , Ben Marwick [sup.1] [sup.2] , Jia-Fu Zhang [sup.3] , Xue Rui [sup.1] , Ya-Mei Hou [sup.4] [sup.5] , Jian-Ping Yue [sup.4] [sup.5] , Wen-Rong Chen [...]

The interplay between Pleistocene climatic variability and hominin adaptations to diverse terrestrial ecosystems is a key topic in human evolutionary studies. Early and Middle Pleistocene environmental change and its relation to hominin behavioural responses has been a subject of great interest in Africa and Europe, though little information is available for other key regions of the Old World, particularly from Eastern Asia. Here we examine key Early Pleistocene sites of the Nihewan Basin, in high-latitude northern China, dating between ∼1.4 and 1.0 million years ago (Ma). We compare stone-tool assemblages from three Early Pleistocene sites in the Nihewan Basin, including detailed assessment of stone-tool refitting sequences at the ∼1.1-Ma-old site of Cenjiawan. Increased toolmaking skills and technological innovations are evident in the Nihewan Basin at the onset of the Mid-Pleistocene Climate Transition (MPT). Examination of the lithic technology of the Nihewan sites, together with an assessment of other key Palaeolithic sites of China, indicates that toolkits show increasing diversity at the outset of the MPT and in its aftermath. The overall evidence indicates the adaptive flexibility of early hominins to ecosystem changes since the MPT, though regional abandonments are also apparent in high latitudes, likely owing to cold and oscillating environmental conditions. The view presented here sharply contrasts with traditional arguments that stone-tool technologies of China are homogeneous and continuous over the course of the Early Pleistocene. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]