November 9 (Xinhuanet) -- The latest archaeological discovery at the Old
Stone Age ruins in Yangyuan County, north China's Hebei Province, proves
that human activities began in eastAsia some 2 million years ago,
archaeological sources said.
Chinese archaeologists unearthed
more than 800 stone tools and animal skeletons left over by the ancients at
historical ruins in a stratum dating back around 2 million
years.
Xie Fei, a research fellow with the Hebei Provincial
Relics Research Institute, said that the latest discovery at the
Majuangou ruins in the Nihewan Basin proves that the date of the early
stage human activities in east Asia is very close to the time of similar
ruins discovered in Africa.
Xie, who has conducted
archaeological research at Nihewan for 18 years, said that it is a question
that deserves discussion among international archaeological circles: whether
human beings migrated to east Asia at a fast speed at an early stage, or
there was another origin place of man in the world.
Palaeoanthropology materials so far available show that the humans
originated from Africa, and the earliest Old Stone Age ruins so far
unearthed in the world are located in Ethiopia, dating back some 2.33
million years.
For a long period of time, many scientists
believed that it wasimpossible for east Asia to have human activities some 2
million years ago.
Xie and his colleagues conducted a
month-long excavation at theMajuangou ruins from September to October, and
unearthed a great number of stone cores, flakes, hammers and scrapers, and
bones of elephants, deer, horses and other animals.
More
than 100 kilometers from Beijing, the over 9,000-square-kilometer Nihewan
basin has very thick deposits of rivers, lakes and yellow earth, which
contain rich fossils of mammals and animals of other species. It has been a
key excavation area of early man in east Asia since the 1920s.
Chinese scientists have discovered a non-stop list of ruins of
the Old Stone Age belonging to the Pleistocene epoch at the
basin.
The Majuangou site is divided into three cultural layers.
The latest excavation was carried out in the third layer that was
discovered in the spring of last year.
Archaeologists said
that the ruins unearthed were of a site where the ancient people were
preparing food, adding that marks ofstrikes by stone tools and scrapers were
found on most of the animal bones discovered at the site, and a firestone
scraper was found on a rib of an animal skeleton.
The
excavated stone tools prove that the manufacturers were highly capable of
distinguishing stone materials and very skilled at processing stone tools,
archaeologist Xie said.
The ruins reveal that this group of
ancient people had reached a high level, Xie
added.
Early this year, Zhu Rixiang, a research
fellow with the geological research institute under the Chinese Academy of
Sciences (CAS), determined that the Xiaochangliang ruins at Nihewan
Basin date back 1.36 million years, thus shifting back theknown date of the
ancients' activities in China by 360,000 years.
Zhu spent three
years studying the date of the Xiaochangliang ruins.
The
third layer of the Majuangou ruins, where the latest archaeological
excavation was conducted, is more than 30 meters lower than the
Xiaochangliang ruins.
Judging from the comparison between the
ancient geomagnetic dating materials and rock formation, researcher Wei Qi,
of the ancient vertebrate and the ancients research institute under the
CAS, said that the third layer of the Majuangou ruins is at least 1.9
million years old and possibly even more than 2 million years in age.
Beijing University professor Lu Zun'e, who made an on-the-spot
investigation at the excavation site, confirmed that the date of the
latest unearthed ruins is earlier than the date of the Xiaochangliang ruins.
Based on the latest discovery, archaeologist Xie Fei concluded
that more earlier human activities might have existed in the Nihewan
Basin.
Next year, Chinese archaeologists will make further and
large scale excavations at the Majuangou ruins and other ruins in the
Nihewan Basin, according to Xie.
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