Tianyuan Cave

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Tianyuan Cave ( Chinese  田园 洞 , Pinyin Tiányuán Dòng , English Tianyuan Cave ) is a paleoanthropological and archaeological site in Zhoukoudian , a suburb of Beijing , People's Republic of China . It is 175 meters above sea level and is located in the village of Huangshandian on the grounds of the Tianyuan Tree Farm , about six kilometers southwest of the well-known Middle Pleistocene fossil sites from which the remains of the Peking people were recovered. It is also known as Zhoukoudian Locality 27 (Zhoukoudian site no. 27).

The Tianyuan Cave was discovered in June 2001 by workers from the Tianyuan Tree Farm , who also found numerous mammal fossils in it. The relatively small cave has a northwest-facing entrance and was first explored in 2003 and 2004 by researchers from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences . The cave was formed in Precambrian limestone and has four clearly distinguishable find horizons , the most productive of which were dated to the Young Pleistocene .

The fossil site became internationally known among experts after it had succeeded in identifying the main components of the diet of the 40,000-year-old fossil of a Homo sapiens called Tianyuan 1 , discovered in the cave : freshwater fish . A lower jaw fragment of this fossil had already been scientifically described.

See also

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Haowen Tong et al .: A preliminary report on the newly found Tianyuan Cave, a Late Pleistocene human fossil site near Zhoukoudian. In: Chinese Science Bulletin. Volume 49, No. 8, 2004, pp. 853-857, doi : 10.1007 / BF02889760
  2. ↑ Hong Shang et al .: An early modern human from Tianyuan Cave, Zhoukoudian, China. In: PNAS . Volume 104, No. 16, 2007, pp. 6573-6578, doi : 10.1073 / pnas.0702169104

Coordinates: 39 ° 39 ′ 28 ″  N , 115 ° 52 ′ 17 ″  E