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Lydia Pyne

Writer & Historian
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"Old Palaeolithic Cycle": Zhoukoudian's Lithics, 1932

March 17, 2016

By spring 1932, excavations at the Zhoukoudian site in China were in full swing.  Not only had hominin materials been recovered in earlier seasons – and published as Sinanthropus pekinensis, known as Homo erectus today – but a plethora of stone tools had also been recovered in many locales from the site’s extensive excavations. 

Zhoukoudian’s stone tool deposits were recovered from three primary loci around Locality 1, all near hominin fossils.  Professor Henri Breuil described the site’s geomorphology and soils in 1931 – the main sediments consisted of an ashy deposit with three players of “artificially broken quartz” and the entire mass had solidified into a densely packed breccia.  Archaeologists Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Wenzhong Pei described the sediments as similar to those classic Paleolithic sites in Western Europe where “classical culture layers” were comprised of quartz chips and burnt bone.

In “The lithic industry of the Sinanthropus deposits in Choukoutien” (published 1932), Teilhard de Chardin and Pei give us sketches, maps, descriptions of the stone tools recovered during that field season.  They conclude their report with, “Sinanthropus has to be held, culturally speaking, as an early representative of the Old Palaeolithic cycle.” [1]

Ongoing publications about the materials recovered from Zhoukoudian excavations – like those of The Bulletin of the Geological Society of China – offer a sense of continuity of excavations between field seasons at Zhoukoudian.  The publications also serve as a pipeline for bringing the excavated materials to the broader audiences within the paleoanthropological and archaeological communities.

NOTES

[1] Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Wenzhong Pei, The Lithic Industry of the Sinanthropus Deposits in Choukoutien (The Society, 1932).

← (Hu)Man(ity) Before History: Jacquetta Hawkes On Paleo DiscoveriesFossil Man in China, 1933: Mapping Zhoukoudian →

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