The Huifeng Mountain Hominid Fossil Site

Two ways the sources describe it

The Lishui District government website, on its "Places of Note" page, lists the Huifeng Mountain hominid fossil site among the district's cultural landmarks, alongside Wuxiang Temple and the Southern Tang reading terrace of Han Xizai. The page is a general enumeration; it gives no date, extent or excavation information for the site, and cannot be used as evidence of date or protection status.

Date and character have to be taken from the archaeological literature. A multidisciplinary study published in East China Geology in 2001 concluded that the cave deposits on Huifeng Mountain should be assigned to the early Holocene, or the early Neolithic, with an absolute age of about 11,000 years; and a human temporal bone recovered from the cave was judged by the excavators to belong to Homo sapiens. Those two items can be checked.

What the name refers to

In the sources available, "the Huifeng Mountain hominid fossil site" and "the Shenxian Cave site" refer to the same place: the location is the same limestone cave on Huifeng Mountain in Baima Town, and the reference is the same deposits and finds. The district website uses the former name, the archaeological literature the latter. This entry and "The Fauna and Dating of the Shenxian Cave Site" describe the site from two sides — the existence of the site and the fact of the finds on the one hand, the fauna and the dating on the other — and do not write one place as two.

Protection status

An enumeration on a district website is not a grade of protection. No record has been traced of the site appearing in a list of protected sites at national, provincial, municipal or district level, so no protection_level is given, and the site is not written up as a published protected site. The sources available give neither the precise location nor the extent of the site nor its present condition.

Basis for the date

The date here falls about nine thousand eight hundred years before Lishui became a county in the eleventh year of the Kaihuang era (591 CE), outside the range of the county's administrative history. The basis is the radiocarbon dating and deposit analysis in the archaeological literature cited above; time.start is set to -9200 (the conversion of about 11,000 years ago), at a precision of century and marked as approximate, and the conversion itself adds no precision to the original study.

To be added

Still to be added: the boundaries and depth of the deposits, the area and levels excavated, a full list of the finds, the protection status and present condition of the site, and the documentary basis for the two spellings of the mountain's name.