Drawing the Paleolithic picture

Sites

Remnants of early human life became more evident as the work progressed. The Bashan archaeological site, which stands on the bank of Yihe River, has been enclosed to prevent it from flooding. After years of hard work, the team led by Li is still excavating Bashan, as well as several other surrounding sites, including the one at Shuiquanyu in Cuijiayu town of the county.

At the Bashan site, the team has dug to a depth of nearly 8 meters, yielding stone tools and animal fossils in 14 layers, each indicating a different culture.

Li says that the oldest layers dating back 100,000 years contain stone tools and fossils of large mammals, including prehistoric straight-tusked elephants and woolly rhinoceroses.

At Shuiquanyu site, discovered in 2022, the stone tools found suggested it could be an Upper Paleolithic era site. Radiocarbon dating confirmed that the tools are approximately 24,000 years old.

Archaeologists have identified over 80 Paleolithic sites in the Yihe River Basin, which form a group centered on Bashan. They are known collectively as the Bashan site complex, or the Bashan site group.

Li says the stratigraphic sequence and the types of artifacts unearthed in the group are consistent, and illustrate the history and material culture of the peoples that lived on the upper reaches of Yihe River between 100,000 and 10,000 years ago.

To date, more than 40,000 artifacts have been found around the Bashan site group, among them stone items like smashed cores, disc-shaped cores, and flakes. The array of tools includes spheroids, scrapers, choppers, points, stone drills and hammerstones.