Longgupo cave

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The Longgupo Cave ( Chinese  龙骨 坡 遗址 , Pinyin Lónggǔpō yízhǐ ) is an archaeological site discovered in 1984 in the Wushan District of the government- direct city ​​of Chongqing in the People's Republic of China . Between 1985 and 1988, the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in collaboration with the National Museum of Chongqing, recovered numerous fossils and stone tools .

In addition to numerous other vertebrate fossils, a total of 16 Gigantopithecus blacki teeth were discovered in the soil layers 5 to 8 . From the soil layers 7 to 8 a small, left lower jaw fragment with two preserved teeth and a third tooth root cavity as well as a single incisor were exposed. The fossils were the early Pleistocene attributed dated at nearly two million years ago and initially after the site in Wushan County as "Homo erectus wushanensis" the kind Homo erectus attributed or as Wushan Man ( 巫山人 , reindeer Wushan , English Wushan Man ). It was also discussed whether they could possibly belong to Homo habilis , since - if the dating is reliable - they would be the oldest evidence of the existence of the genus Homo in China. This assignment is controversial, however, as the structure of the lower jaw crowns differs significantly from other Homo erectus finds, more similar to those of fossil orangutans and the fragment may belong to a species of ape that has not been scientifically described.

It is also unclear how the individually found incisor , the structure and size of which indicates an origin from a modern person , got into the older sediment layers .

The Longgupo site ( 龙骨 坡 遗址 , Longgupo yizhi ) has been on the list of monuments of the People's Republic of China (4-1) since 1996 .

A fossil fauna , the Longgupo fauna ( 龙骨 坡 动物 群 , Longgupo dongwuqun ) of the early Pleistocene, which "consists of 29 families, 74 genera and 116 species ", is named after the site .

literature

  • Jin et al .: A Preliminary Study on the Early Pleistocene Deposits and the Mammalian Fauna from the Renzi Cave, Fanchang, Anhui, China. In: Acta Anthropologica Sinica. Supplement to Vol. 19, 2000
  • Deborah A. Bakken: Taphonomic Parameters of Pleistocene Hominid Sites in China. ( Full text (PDF: 7.2 MB) ( Memento from February 26, 2014 in the Internet Archive ))

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Huang Wanpo et al .: Early Homo and associated artefacts from Asia. In: Nature . Volume 378, 1995, pp. 275-278, doi: 10.1038 / 378275a0
  2. ↑ Jeffrey H. Schwartz , Ian Tattersall : Whose teeth? In: Nature. Volume 381, 1996, pp. 201–202, doi: 10.1038 / 381201a0
    National Geographic , May 1997, p. 95
    Was the Wushan man really a man? Die Welt from June 17, 2009
  3. ↑ Peter Brown : Chinese Middle Pleistocene hominids and modern human origins in east Asia. In: Lawrence Barham and Kate Robson Brown (Eds.): Human Roots. Africa and Asia in the Middle Pleistocene. Western Academic & Specialist Publishers, Bristol 2001, pp. 136–137, ISBN 978-0953541843 , full text (PDF; 3.5 MB)
  4. ↑ Jin et al .: A Preliminary Study on the Early Pleistocene Deposits and the Mammalian Fauna from the Renzi Cave, Fanchang, Anhui, China. In: Acta Anthropologica Sinica. Supplement to Vol. 19, 2000, p. 242

Coordinates: 30 ° 21 '25 "  N , 109 ° 4' 50"  E