The Fauna and Dating of the Shenxian Cave Site

The cave and its deposits

Shenxian Cave is a limestone cave on Huifeng Mountain in Baima Town, Lishui District. According to a multidisciplinary study published in East China Geology in 2001, the cave was formed by groundwater dissolving Carboniferous limestone along bedding-plane fissures, and the cave deposits should be assigned to the early Holocene, or the early Neolithic.

The fauna

The same study describes the fauna found in the cave as representative of the transition from the Late Pleistocene fauna of southern China to the modern fauna. The judgement concerns the character of the assemblage as a whole — that it contains both Late Pleistocene and modern elements — and does not turn on any single species.

A human temporal bone came from the same deposit as the animal fossils. The excavators judged the bone to show no significant difference in form from that of modern humans and to belong to Homo sapiens, noting that a separate paper would study the fossil. The circumstances of the find are set out in "The Discovery of the Shenxian Cave Site on Huifeng Mountain".

The date

The study gives an absolute age of about 11,000 years ago, which converts to roughly 9200 BCE. time.start is set to -9200, at a precision of century and marked as approximate: the study's own wording is "about 11,000 years ago", a round figure, and converting it to a calendar era adds no precision.

Some aggregator pages write the age as "11,200 ± 1,000 years ago". That figure is more precise but rests on a less authoritative source, and this entry does not adopt it; it follows the journal, and confidence is accordingly medium.

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 the pollen and vertebrate analysis in the 2001 study, not an inference by this site; the entry states the basis and marks the precision and the approximate character of the figure.

Where research opinion ends and fact begins

The title of that paper presses its conclusion towards "the history of Chinese civilisation should be traced back ten thousand years". That is the authors' argument, not this site's conclusion, and it is not entered here as fact. This entry adopts only the parts that can be checked: the origin and age of the cave and its deposits, the character of the fauna, the fact of the human temporal bone and the animal fossils, and the radiocarbon-dated range.

To be added

Still to be added: a species list for the fauna with counts, the detailed results of the pollen analysis, the sample numbers and laboratory details of the dating, and the present condition and protection status of the cave.