The Discovery of the Shenxian Cave Site on Huifeng Mountain

The site and the find

The Shenxian Cave site is a limestone cave on Huifeng Mountain in Baima Town, Lishui District. The district government's "Places of Note" page lists the Huifeng Mountain hominid fossil site among the district's cultural landmarks, but gives no date and no excavation information; the date and the character of the site have to be taken from the archaeological literature.

At the end of 1977 archaeologists excavated inside the cave. In the course of clearing the deposits they recovered a human temporal bone; the excavation record notes that it was found on 16 May while the deposits were being cleared. Fossils of several animal species came from the same deposit.

The fossil and the date

The excavators judged the temporal bone to show "no significant difference from that of modern humans" and to belong to Homo sapiens, noting that a separate paper would study the fossil. On the age of the cave and its deposits, a multidisciplinary study published in East China Geology in 2001 concluded that the cave was formed by groundwater dissolving Carboniferous limestone along bedding-plane fissures; that the deposits should be assigned to the early Holocene, or the early Neolithic; and that the absolute age is about 11,000 years. 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.

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. This entry adopts only the parts that can be checked: the location of the site, the fact of the human temporal bone and the animal fossils, and the radiocarbon-dated range. Whether the cave counts as a "cultural site", and what the traces of human activity amount to, depends on further archaeological material, and the entry draws no inference.

Dating basis

The date assigned here precedes the founding of Lishui County in the eleventh year of the Kaihuang era of the Sui (591 CE) by some sixteen centuries, and it is not inferred from documents but given by archaeological and geological research. It rests on three things: the stratigraphy of the cave deposits, assigned by the study to the early Holocene or the early Neolithic; a radiocarbon determination of about 11,000 years ago, from which this entry reckons a date of about 9200 BCE and therefore records time.start as -9200; and the character of the fauna in the cave, which belongs to the transition from the Late Pleistocene fauna of southern China to the modern fauna and agrees with that range. The three support one another, but the precision of the absolute date is limited, so the entry uses a precision of "century" and marks the date as approximate rather than giving a single year.

Uncertainties

First, the dating is not stated uniformly. The journal gives "about 11,000 years ago"; some aggregator pages write "11,200 ± 1,000 years ago". The two are not contradictory, but the latter is more precise on a less authoritative source, so this entry follows the journal, and confidence is set to medium.

Second, no place entry has been created for the site, so there is no place_ref and no coordinates; the exact location and current state of protection await a site visit.